


Tony Stark is not Willie Wonka...

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Homestuck, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Humor, Avengers Tower, Crossover, Everyone Under One Roof, Everything is Not Entirely Objectionable and You Will Be Happy Dammit, Families of Choice, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rebuilding, Tony Stark Mother Hen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-05 06:54:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 67,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1809340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark is not Willie Wonka, even if he has the last of the Oompa Loompas (Trolls) in his basement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tony Stark is not Willie Wonka...

**Tony Stark is not Willie Wonka, even if he has the last of the ~~Oompa Loompas~~ Trolls in his basement.**

When the baby agents of SHIELD class 137 meets the gray alien, (Tony introduces him (probably?) as “Sparky”) they’re taking mental notes, (everything is a test) but get a tad derailed by the obvious: gray, horns, whoa teeth!

Most of them notice that for a Real Live Alien, Exhibit A today is a classic example of Universal Spindly Computer Nerd. Retro 3D glasses, check. Mismatched worn talons tapping double time on a half empty can of Monster, check. Sarcastic assumption that he’ll be fixing their end-user-itis pretty soon, check. As Real Live Aliens go, he’s not Larger-Than-Life-Friendly!RenFair like Thor, or Seething-Sack-of-Crazy-Badgers-and-Magic like Loki, or impassive juggernaut of alien-robot-hivemind of the week.

The most disturbing thing about him is how he’s camping out in the uncanny valley. He _should_ be more disturbing than he is, and that’s disturbing. The flatness in his voice is that he is equally unimpressed with class 137 and not a lack of intonation capability. In low light, with sunglasses and a hat, he could almost pass, the basic body build and joints are very familiar. The smile’s a little wicked and there’s a least twice as many canines showing as even the most overcompensating vampire could manage. But everyone is pretty sure that Tony Stark can already kill them with his brain, so it’s not really intimidating so much as another reinforcement of rule 17 of SHIELD’s Other handbook: Don’t mess with the nerds.

*

The texts come in after 2am just as Pepper has completed her abbreviated nightly routine and collapsed in the (very nice) hotel bed in Munich.

“Not Urgent”, Tony sends.

“But theoretically how mad would you be about illegal aliens? They don’t have passports but JARVIS can fix that.”

Pepper’s used to a lot of late night inanity and this fails to generate enough adrenaline to respond before the ramble continues.

“They could pass for mutants.”

“We’ll call them exchange students.”

“Imma gonna call em Scottish. They kinda look like gargoyles.”

“Btw, they’re minors.”

“I think.”

“thx pep”

“xoxo”

The phone is silent. She turns the light back off and falls asleep.

*

Tony is fond of giving nicknames. It’s one partly a step toward familiarity and partly his inevitable need to poke people until they react. He’s also not so secretly fond of strays. Hence, he now has Sparky, Shouty, Hippie McClown, Hipster, Trouble, Sparkles and all the rest living in his basement. They claim they’re trolls, but really, they’re teenagers, and he would be a terrible parent, how did he end up a halfway house for aliens? He wonders if Coulson hires out as Super Nanny, because he’s in over his head.

*

Hippie has infested the vent system. Clint is Not Happy about sharing his safe space. There are mutters about “Clowns, why is it always clowns?!” and faint honking in the vents. Sometimes in the long hours of quality lab time he surfaces from inspiration and thinks he hears the occasional “MoThErFuCkInG MiRaClEs”. Darcy leaves wrapped PB&J sandwiches and bottled drinks by the vents like offerings. He’s not sure who’s eating them, and he hopes that they’re coming out somewhere to use the facilities, but he’s relieved that no one’s dying in his vents, it would be terrible for air quality. As it is, he really hopes that no one needs a drug test, because sometimes the vents, especially near Bruce’s lab, smell like weed. And he’s really grateful that JARVIS sees all, because really, someone has to keep them all out of trouble. Tony would be a terrible parent. JARVIS is already the adult of the household.

*

No one sees Trouble coming but Tony isn’t the only one to wonder if this is what it felt like to grow up with Loki. He starts to feel a bit proprietary when she steals SHIELD’s list of known locations of Chitauri parts, both biological and mechanical. She saunters back like a queen from “it’s not interrogation, just some questions” and drops the list on his desk with nonchalance, but she’s really the cat in the cream and he knows fronts, and she looks just a little bit like Natasha must have once, young, and strong, and brittle. He’s designing a better bionic arm. It will have a tracking chip.

He assigns Darcy and JARVIS to keep her busy, (JARVIS relays most of their ideas because, telepathy? So not fair.) If anyone ever embodied “idle hands do the devil’s work”, Vriska’s not so much a ticking time bomb as a pinless grenade during a few seconds of grace. Darcy hunts down “assimilating modern American human culture events” and threatens to sign them all up, This Means You Too, Tony. JARVIS arranges volunteer opportunities.

Vriska sees more of the city than most of them. Mostly she pronounces them lame (the homebodies and the volunteer work both). By the end of the first month, she’s walked dogs (and was asked not to come back), been evicted from three museums and the zoo, cooked at the soup kitchen (and was asked not to come back), picked up trash in the park (laaaaaaaame), shoveled debris at several of the Chitauri impact sites (and was thanked), received certified mail that she’s banned in perpetuity from all Madame Tussauds locations, and settled into a routine of reading at no less than eight library and kindergarten classrooms. The kids love her. She calls them minions. Tony’s going to design her the _best_ bionic eye. It will _roll_. Fury will be _so envious_. (If Tony had a better idea of normal, he might wonder where she found a stuffed and mounted white Persian to complete his wax doppelganger’s evil overlord look. As it is, he’s rather fond of the mustache on Clint, who totally can’t pull the look off.)

*

Tony’s dubbed Kanaya Maryam Her Serene Majesty. Her asymmetrical horns crown a figure precise in posture and pronunciation, outfitted with equal care. Darcy comes to think of her as an ally in the fight to keep everyone healthy and un-maimed. She can’t very well make them eat their vegetables when she doesn’t know what they can digest or what’s poisonous. She gets JARVIS to record the rundown of what trolls eat (everything) what trolls like (generally meat and sweets) and who are the exceptions (Equius “does not eat the flesh of noble beasts” (and Darcy’s fine with vegetarians, really, but she _so_ wants to poke holes in that “noble” description) and Eridan and Feferi need fresh fish, bone in, and seaweed.) JARVIS sets up a steady order of whatever’s freshest and lowest on the food chain at the fish market.

(At this point everyone in the tower has heard enough scuttlebutt on “highblood rage” that all forms of tuna and other swimmy bioaccumulating predators are listed as contraband with no further explanation. The contraband list is 30 pages long in English and pictograms and located on the fridge in every shared kitchen in the tower. There is a fervent underground exchange among the teenagers for the supermagnets that hold them up. Darcy has been gifted with no less than four in an assortment of googly eyes, glitter, and pipe cleaner tentacles. They are all kinds of useful and there is an escalating competition for attaching them to unexpected places. Dummy has acquired a line of them down his arm. Tony will never notice that no one ever tries to attach one to the suits. There’s competition, and there’s accidental murder, and most Trolls, as violent as they might think themselves, find accidental murder to be sloppy and off-putting.)

Ms. Maryam is seldom outside the company of Ms. Lalonde. The two of them tour the garment district, and commandeer a section of one of the sunny midlevel community rooms for a studio. Rose knits and Kanaya drapes, and cuts, and sews. A few quick fixes and a few more soiree security details, and a steady stream of SHIELD agents become customers as word gets out that Ms. Maryam’s dresses and suits are tailored to carrying a variety of concealed items.

Her Majesty accepts a variety of exchanges for her services. Bolts of expensive silks, semiprecious stones, feathers, packets of seeds, baked goods, canned goods, small knives, dog-eared copies of philosophy books, advanced anatomy, biology, and horticulture texts, and gossip, all make their way to her hands and stash. It’s just as well that her ambitions run to fashion, or they could be witnessing the advent of something dangerous. Darcy, Coulson, Stubbs McAngry Muffin, Ms. LaLonde, and Her Serenity watch Super Nanny marathons, drink tea, and discuss Troll and Human culture, cullable offenses, management strategies. When he’s short of sleep, Tony sometimes thinks Kanaya glows, but when it comes to built-in nightlights, he really can’t point fingers.

*

Most of the other kids get along with her Majesty. Both younger Striders tend to heckle Ms. Lalonde. He still can’t get a straight answer as to how the human ones are related. Someone started to hum “I’m my own grandpa” the last time he asked.

He has his suspicions and he hates to repeat himself. He knows that the kids all communicate with a sort of personal tweet/forum program. And he knows that it’s likely that they have screen names. But the day he learns that Ms. Rose Lalonde goes by TentacleTherapist, everything both makes a sort of terrifying sense and he’s more in the dark than before.

He sets JARVIS on a hunt to find out everyone’s alter ego. This kind of thing can be embarrassing. It can also be very telling. He spends several long minutes (and that’s Stark® thinking time, so really, longer than that) trying to decipher how carcinoGeneticist fits Shouty and his self-hatred and his anger with the world in general. Being Karkat must be exhausting. It’s like someone shoved Napoleon and MLK Jr. into one tiny body and he keeps trying to fix things and the world keeps being a miserable place. As he learns more about Alternia he has to sit and not hyperventilate. He kind of wants to hug Shouty. He knows that it wouldn’t work.

*

Sparky and JARVIS get into regular arguments. He’s never heard JARVIS argue. Outflank, out-snark, out _gun_ , yes, but not this. Shouty, aka Stubs McMuffin, informs him that they’ve stopped flirting and settled down in cahoots. He feels strangely like a parent finding out that their child has discovered sex, which doesn’t make sense because he’s gotten pretty far down the sexual bucket list, and JARVIS is _always_ watching.  Also, buckets. He thinks he knows a song about buckets, and if he doesn’t, he’s going to commission one, because, this? Comedy. Gold.

The hilarious thing about the whole situation is that Sollux Captor is smart. Dangerously, Tony Stark levels of smart. He could sweet talk almost any computer system in the world, security, banking, nukes, whatever, and has the sort of patience that could dig out blackmail or leverage on almost anyone. Given sufficient time, he could creep in on so many levels that no one would ever guess how far the infiltration went until it was too late. He could be the biggest danger in a building full of dangerous people and the punchline is that he has _absolutely no ambition_. (Tony could conquer the world, if he wanted, but he doesn’t have the patience for administration.)

Sollux works tech support for the most complicated Starkphone and tablet problems, feeding back to the customer-facing sides of tech support and the R&D labs, and breeds huge fuzzy purple bees, and has taken over a minor lab with the shades drawn down in a mid-level where his bees buzz in and out all day visiting New York more than the rest of the trolls put together. Tony likes the bees. They’re small and busy and glow in patterns – Morse code and _Beenary_. And they _dance_. The most hilarious butt wiggling ever, and Tony’s seen a lot of desperate partying. He spends a little while worried that he’s just introduced another source of colony collapse to North America, and the Demise of Agriculture As We Know It. Pepper would never forgive him. But the bees check out okay through any tests that Bruce can conjure and they act just a tiny bit like DUM-E, and he thinks that if he had more room in his overworked heart he’d be just a little bit in love. (Who is he kidding, it’s way too late.) JARVIS orders hanging gardens on the midlevel through high balconies. Number 42 tags after Tony like a lovesick puppy.

The lab door is plastered with signs: Do Not Dii2turb the Bee2. Do Not Eat The Miind Honey. No 2piiderBiitche2. No Fii2hDouche2. SHIELD has caught on to SI’s newest secret weapon and is desperately envious despite the source. Tony is smug. SHIELD negotiates for per diem contracts on a case by case basis. Hipster negotiates back. Sparky takes selective contracts. There may be blatant violations of the No Fii2hDouche2 sign. Tony very carefully does not examine this more closely. He retreats to his lab with 42.

*

Tony and Darcy find out that there are no less than a dozen bucket songs, and another couple dozen modified for extensive bucket abuse, courtesy of one Strider or another.

He sends one of the younger ones the camera on his bookmark list (privacy is for citizens, they all live in his pad). The middle one gets access to one of the lower level labs, the recycling heap, and a modest budget. He sends the eldest a commission for puppet porn of the latest two asses to run for political reelection on a platform of mutant registration. He’d do more for Big Strider, but the dude’s built like he eats Zorro for breakfast, JARVIS has caught him sparring, at one time or another, with Natasha, Thor, all his mini-mes, and a battlebot (Tony’s not allowed to make fighting robots. This is _not fair_.) and he doesn’t look like the type to accept charity. Tony would explain that it’s not charity, it’s self-amusement (really he buys people things to make them happy), but once the YouTube goes viral he figures Big Strider is all set with his puppet porn empire. (He doesn’t leave the other young one out, but it will take a while to get the interface right on a new bionic arm. Trouble’s was easy by comparison. Ugh. Gooshy bits.)

*

Truthfully, he’s fond of most of them. It’s impossible not to like Sparkles and her huge toothy grin and deep giggles and her love of swoopy filmy sparkly scarves and skirts, or timid Tiny Tim, who can’t quite maintain eye contact but blushes brown at the smallest kindness. It would be like kicking puppies, and Tony’s been many terrible wasteful things, but he’s not a puppy kicker. He’s going to build Tiny Tim the _Best Flying Wheelchair Ever_. And he’s never calling him that to his face.

*

Shouty is good for a laugh - movie marathon night has never been so anthropologically violated or hilarious. And he might not get the concept of using your indoor shouting voice, but he keeps their resident PolySci graduate happy as a calciferous bivalve. He thinks they might be plotting to take over the world. Frankly, they’d do a better job than most. (The audio file of _Darcy and Karkat Debate Government_ is a secret favorite of a certain secretive government department. Some people pass porn. SHIELD passes political commentary.)

One noon that shall not be spoken of again, they are two insomniac ships passing in the kitchen. ShortStuff is strangely quiet and living dangerously, consuming a can of Natasha’s caviar. He’s never been much for fish eggs, but considering some of the stuff the kids consume, like the honeyed fried crickets that seem to be black-market gold, it seems more a troll food than a human one anyhow. McStubs is mostly pushing the roe around the can. His head is low and, if his eyes well a bit, Tony’s not commenting.

*

Sometimes he takes the next generation of the suit out for more testing. The roof, formerly solely his domain, is now mostly Clint’s. He finds Tavros with him one day. The kid’s got binoculars. Clint has, well Clint. There’s peregrine falcons nesting on the deck below and they’re peering into the glare of the sunset to pick out the parents returning to the nest. The birds are swift and sleek, even on what is, essentially, a grocery run. He stills for a few moments with them and spends some time calculating velocity (he’s impressed) and how to get a birdbot to fly (too heavy, too fragile, fixed wings or rotors would be cheating… he’s going to have to toss his textile R&D servants something to do after they figure out Hulk spandex.)

Later, as it becomes evident that almost all the puberty-stricken tower denizens are “gifted” in one manner or another, one might wonder why Tavros never seems to use his talent. Trouble’s on “no puppeting manipulation, missy I mean it” watch from now to, like, eternity, and Clint still tends to leave the room when she enters it. No one has to tell Tavros not to make the birds divebomb pedestrians or the bees swarm traffic lights. Tony mentally promotes him from Tiny Tim to Ferdinand and has JARVIS order an aquarium for one of the common rooms. Ferdinand is one of the few in the tower that never go looking for trouble. It’s soothing.

*

It takes a while for him to give Equius a nickname. Sweaty or Yes-man is too cruel and he’s got limits. The kid’s got issues. He’s also brilliant. Tony sees him a bit like a warped mirror – this is what he might have turned out like if he’d been better about drinking the superiority Kool-Aid. And, you know, grown up in Fascist Troll Russia. The breaking things, the alternating turns of shrinking horror and condescending disgust, he’s out of control and flailing for control, and barely keeping his head up. He’s also the closest thing the trolls have to a medical expert.

(Tony isn’t the only one who carefully doesn’t think about all the medical issues that haven’t reared their ugly heads (yet). Do human drugs work and how? Are they all sailing along consuming things that are mutually poisonous? What if someone needs a transfusion? What if they’re carrying the next plague or Ebola, or HIV for humans? What if they’re about to catch small pox from humans? What if …)

If he’d been human, if he’d been born here, Equius would have been well on his way to becoming an engineer or veterinarian or nurse or surgeon or _something_. The terrible lack of bedside manner wouldn’t have been a first - plenty of doctors are sure their real title is God. Tony sometimes feels that way.

When Equius is absorbed and undisturbed, his large hands are surprisingly steady and gentle. It’s the overthinking and emotion, and personal interactions, that seem to throw him. That’s actually how he first starts to absorb Shouty’s diatribes of “ROMANCE, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. THEY’RE MORAILS, HUMAN”. And how he starts to figure out that Catgirl is really closer to Catwoman. Well, that, and how Natasha seems marginally more smug about finding another new sparring partner/student. Anyway of it, Equius has actually been cooperating with mini-big Strider and Big Strider McDouchMuffin on an exoskeleton for Tiny Tim, despite the fact that he usually treats him about as well as Scrooge. The kid claims that it’s for the challenge, but Tony figures that Catgirl made _the eyes_ at him.

*

The sharp spindly one is McGruff. She declares herself delighted to take a bite out of Crime. She also licks him and declares that he tastes like grain based fermented behavioral modifier and the color blue. He informs her that his tastes run to much more expensive liquor (he’s lying) and he much prefers red and gold (he’s not).

She declares that they will be good frenemies and before he can clarify if that’s human frenemies or troll something, because, seriously, she’s way too young for him, she manages to ninja away. He’s been physically out maneuvered by the blind girl, and he’s both charmed and terrified, but mostly grateful that JARVIS _sees all_. He appoints JARVIS as intermediary and JARVIS introduces Miss Pyrope to the New York Public Library system’s audiobooks, podcasts, college courses, and legal section. If there’s a brief tremor in the force, he’s pretty sure that it’s on the side of Justice. He doesn’t see a great deal of Terezi most of the time but the conspiracy websites JARVIS monitors for him start describing a string of muggers left in embarrassing situations, all complaining of a red eyed cackling demon. He’s very proud, and, of course, knows nothing.

*

Vriska continues her ambles among the city that never sleeps, and JARVIS monitors her progress via twitter feeds. Never before has someone so managed to put the trolling in strolling.

*

Most of the trolls treat Hipster McScarf like a mildly infectious respiratory infection. The kid’s a fish out of water with people and pathetically grateful for attention of any kind. (Tony’s learned not to use the word pathetic or pity with the trolls. Buckets are funny, but breaking hearts, not so much.) He tends to tag along after anyone who’ll let him.

First he gravitates to Steve; Tony finds them several times in the middle of a drawing lesson, discussing tactics, or exchanging book recommendations on American and World history.  They have a standing Wednesdays-in-the-park engagement that results in a steady accumulation of drying canvases in an assortment of: recognizable landscapes (Steve), unintentionally hilarious and menacing portraits of waterfowl (Hipster), recognizable, often poignant people (Steve), slowly-improving-not-quite-recognizable-people (McScarf), fantastical retro-futuristic pulp-fiction-cover-worthy scenes (Steve), and strangely terrifying, sometimes beautiful landscapes and animals (?) that are either fragments of LSD or Alternia (Eridan).

Steve is a steadying influence. If Tony’s unintentional Den Mother, Steve is the encouraging but firm Father figure. Tony doesn’t mind division of duties but wishes his involved less worrying.

McScarf expands his circle cautiously to Thor, hanging onto every word about the hunt for the unpronounceable something or other, (Eridan seems to be drinking in Thor’s animation and general Hail-Fellow-Well-Met as much as anything).

Then finally he finds Clint and Jade, and evidently there’s a universal language to shooting shit up. (And explosions. These three appreciate a good explosion as much as Tony). Danny-Boy’s smart enough not to annoy Tasha and has nothing in common with Bruce, except, well, the awkward, but Darcy banters with him until he banters back, and declares him her favorite hipster. She graciously ignores how desperate and disbelieving he seems about it. They go shopping together and do each other’s nails. He settles down further with regular meetings with Clint and Jade on the range, and Darcy outside of it. (And where has Jade been all of her life? Tony will adopt this child and foster her precocious Science. She is Shiny like Gollum’s Precious!)

Eridan wears glasses like coke bottles but shoots better than most of SHIELD. He’s prickly and obnoxious, and every bit as touch starved as most of the trolls. Tony wonders when he became a halfway house for broken people to rebuild themselves. He finds that he doesn’t mind so much.

*

Tony gets a saltwater pool installed and is treated to duel shark tooth grins from Hipster McSkinny Jeans and Sparkles. The peace only lasts about 5 seconds, then Sparkles glares and Hipster ducks his head away and mutters that he’d like to try it out later but he’s busy now, and really Mistah Stark, this is the nicest thing anyone’s evva done for them. His head is still curiously canted, horns away, neck open, one hand holding his scarf bunched at his throat like a security blanket when Sparkles tosses her formidable rack, her formidable mass of hair, and suddenly there’s a shirt and skirt on the floor. Tony slaps one hand over his face, one over McScarf’s and manages to spin them away and march out without falling on his face. Eridan smiles just a little bit and tells him Feferi always wears a bathing suit underneath anyhow. He wonders if he’s just seen an instance of two trolls in the wild, as raised by wolves.

In the following days, both of them are a little quieter, a little calmer. Eridan’s breathing pattern changes, deeper, slower, the cicada hum of spoken Alternian settling in a deeper register, the soft dry rustling to his breathing gone. Feferi is still genuinely happy about just about everything, but it seems like some of the urgency to her has found peace. He knows that of all of them, “seadweller” respiratory systems are drastically different. He thinks about how polluted all the water in the Sound is. He thinks about chlorination and how delicate human lungs are. He has a moment to wonder if they have been headed to a slow cumulative tragedy and hopes that it’s been averted.

*

And that’s when things start to, not settle down, but it starts to seem feasible that they might settle down, when the one-eyed authority (no the other one, no the joke never gets old) decrees that one would-be-supervillian will complete his rehab on Midgard/Earth/Planet Dirt. As far as Tony Stark, reluctant landlord, can determine, the only upside is that he will be introducing Spooky McHappy Goth and Sparkles to Reindeer Games. The girls have formidable racks of both kinds. There will _never_ be enough jokes about overcompensating.

Introductions are surprisingly uneventful. Loki makes disturbing statements and disturbing observations, and is generally disturbed, but is surprisingly less murder-happy than depressed. He lurks like a stray cat that’s moved in but still waiting to be shooed out. He sharpens his tongue and his smile, and seems to mostly be trying too hard, in between sleeping too much and eating the contents of any unguarded, unobserved fridge.

Everything settles back a bit until a few days later when JARVIS calls his attention to a confrontation in the kitchen. He finds Jade Big Guns McSmilyScience, of all people, tearing the resident icicle a new one over taunting Clint. It’s over before he needs to interfere. He wonders when he became den mother.

A few days later, by chance, Loki storms past and he catches her telling Clint off, more gently, for provoking Loki. She calls Clint a Butt. She calls Tony a WorryWart.

He thinks he must be imagining it but he checks with JARVIS, and there really is a pattern. It’s disturbing. They’re both seeking her, and each other, out. It’s not flirting, as far as he can tell, but he thought he was an expert and trolls are pretty weird, and Harley herself is like a tiny experiment in alternative childrearing.

(He doesn’t care if his parents were lax and overbearing by turns, a dog, even a creepy teleporting one, is not a parent and the kids were _not raised by wolves_. He keeps telling himself that though it’s getting hard to convince himself as he learns about CrabDad, Tinkerbull, Pounce De Leon, SpiderMom, and, OMG he is _never_ sleeping again, Gl'bgolyb.)

He’s disturbed enough to suck it up and visit Shouty. Catgirl obviously senses a disturbance in the force, because he didn’t see her anywhere and now she’s bounded in with _diagrams_. He wonders if Loki and Clint know that they are the two side leaves of a club-shaped troll romance with a minor in the middle. That’s it. Darcy is appointed to Cheerful Safe Sex lecturer, because stick a fork in him, he’s done.

He wishes someone would tell him what the responsible adult thing to do is, because he is the responsible adult, it is him, and he has _no clue_. He’s used to being the disturber and not the disturbee. He didn’t sign up for culture night or student exchange. Okay, so the Monorail cat system seems pretty sweet but he’s not so sure enshrining your archrival for formalized hatesex is an improvement.

He’s been informed that Hammer is probably jonesing for his kismiquadrant (Just NO. In no universe is that happening.), Dr. Doom and Richards are obviously flirting out a hatetango, and he’s not sure what to think of Loki and Thor now. He wonders if Buckteeth McSmilydon knows that Shouty’s been flirting like a matador flapping a cap at a bull.

He thinks his brain might be sprained. Emotions are messy. Catgirl’s still going strong, but Shortstuff seems to have at least a bit of sympathy for his swimming paradigms and provides escape.

Evidently not that much sympathy because the next time he emerges from his lab for food he gets double teamed by Her Serene Majesty and Ms. LaLonde for Troll Reproduction 101. He has a sudden sympathy for all doomed creatures. He has a sick sense of admiration for Shouty’s favorite epithets, suddenly clear, and not. Writhing bag of bulges. Nooklicking-Shameglobe-Parasite. Bucketlicker. Bucketkicker. Bucketless. Grubfucker. Dronekisser. Motherfucker?! (And what exactly is Grubsauce?! Troll Spunk? Dead Babies? Gravy? D. All of the above?!) Strangely, (there will never be enough _strange_ to cover this social experiment) incestuous slurry is actually the technical term.

The conversation branches out to the different types of drones, acceptable and unacceptable mutations, culling, castist propaganda, the fleet, the empire, the Empress. It’s a planet full of laissez-faire _Lord of the Flies_ with a side order of _Hunger Games_ and he’s being instructed in level tones by two sixteen year olds and he already has enough nightmares of his own. He wants to shove his fingers in his ears pretend no one’s home, but he’s kicking himself because since when did Tony Stark back down from uncomfortable conversations instead of digging himself deeper? (Side note: bricklaying drones literally shit bricks. They have not reached the bottom of the rabbithole. Side side note: Alternia probably has vorpal rabbits.)

*

If Tony had been pressed to predict a knock down drag out fight, he would be out of his betting money, because Sparky and Sparkles were not on his list of usual suspects.

Trouble, McGruff, any one of the Striders, all of whom seem to major in provocation and would do it for the hell of it, or Hippie finally snapping (he can ignore social niceties, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t see how every Troll in the room except Shouty leaves him Hulk-size personal space), he has contingency plans, but this, he has a sudden feeling that his backup plans need backup plans because they might have guessed some of the kids have powers but there’s _been no proof_.

It’s always been pretty obvious that there was something going on between the two, and really it was almost sweet, (besides the brooding emo ex), like the popular girl and the unsociable nerd, but really, how many high school romances _don’t_ end in tears or messy divorce with someone diddling the cabana boy?

And breakups are messy, but usually the drama’s not literal fireworks. Sollux’s usual weapons are sarcasm and eye rolling and maybe a bit of computer sabotage, but he’s clearly in a Hulk-grade full-out screaming-meemie breakdown. He’s shrieking something at Feferi, and his usually softly sarcastic voice is cracking on the high notes. There’s whipcracks of red and blue electricity crawling up his arms and torso, and down his legs, and his horns are crowned like Tesla coils. There’s a smoking book clutched in one hand, claws sunk half in, cover peeling back, and he’s shaking it at her. His eyes, normally glowing steady as the arc reactor, are flickering, and Tony doesn’t know if that means he’s about to blow up, burn out, or go for gold and do both. The couch and carpet aren’t on fire, but there are singed spots, sparks floating like ball lightening, and it feels like one of Thor’s storms about to strike.

Feferi is throwing her own drama-queen-worthy tantrum, looming over him with her extra half inch of body height and half foot of horn, earfins flared, lungs so inflated she seems half again as large, and she’s screaming back in a pitch both high and reverberatingly deep and Tony’s mind is intoning “things man was not meant to know”, while really Tony’s the first to open the box, _all_ the boxes,  but this, his ears insist, this is something he’s not meant to have to _hear_.

He doesn’t know if they were mostly alone to start or if everyone else just cleared out, but Loki’s perched, hungry and creepy in the corner, looking like he just wants some popcorn with his schadenfreude, and is clearly no help, and he has no idea if they’ll damage each other, or you know, take out a floor like Loki.

And JARVIS, JARVIS saves the day because suddenly the elevator dings and the Sparky whirls to face it and the face of salvation is Happy Goth, who pats out the sparks like she’s shooing fireflies and, and Her Serenity who draws the decidedly less sparkly Feferi aside in a graceful motion she can’t quite resist. Aradia bustles her sadly sparking moirail off, down the stairs and not the elevator, thank the little mercies, he’s going to insulate _everything_ , when did Thor become the _test_ run, and Kanaya settles one deflated and tearful teenager on the equally sad and deflated couch and Loki looks like a displeased cat that just saw the mouse get rescued. Loki can suck it.  

He discreetly takes himself elsewhere. (He can’t help but meddle anyhow.) Loki as a prime source is like the definition of unreliable narrator, so really he can’t be blamed if he asks Thor to Allspeak-translate JARVIS’s recording. He doesn’t get it at first, too much of it is technical or has no equivalent, but he knows it’s related to castes and powers and the one way that the Alternian Empire is clearly, unacceptably, currently (not for long) light-years ahead of Tony Stark, (besides FTL travel, he’s working on it). Wetware. (Eww. It’s attached to all these gooshy bits and really he’s an engineer, and a genius, and a billionaire, and philanthropist, and a playboy (not so much since _responsibility_ ), _not a doctor_. And also, he’s in-your-face smug about the Arc Reactor in general, but he really doesn’t want to think about his directly installed bionic bits more than he has to, at least not the installation bit.) 

Kanaya’s involved, so asking Rose is like going behind her back, and Equius could translate the technical bits, but if castes are involved is biased like a thing that is, well, super biased, Ferdinand might not know, and he’d feel like a bully either way… so Shouty it is.

When it’s all unraveled he still feels like a bully, because Steve is irrationally hogging the blame for Feferi finding the book (it’s not really anyone’s fault, but if this is like a kinky genre or something, maybe she should be discussing it with her significant something-or-other before porning it up? Is it porn? Pale porn is like full of cuddling and blushing and bloodpusher-felt emotions. And Equius’s room is full of “art”. He so doesn’t know what non-porn Troll art is. But after this episode, he _so_ wants to speculate to Hill about Fury’s relationship with the Helicarrier.).

So Steve’s been on a sci-fi book binge and Tony’s sick of the flying car jokes, really most people are barely adequate drivers, you want taxis that fly?, and he gets a lot of gifts, (offerings?), because Steve’s, well, Steve, and helpful, and earnest, and so very grateful and big-eyed like a freaking puppy . And so one of the other volunteers in the city cleanup (of course Steve volunteers, he’s perfect like that) had some books they’re cleaning out, and Steve schleps back this mover’s box of 70s and 80s and 90s sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, and sometimes questionable literature that Tony can’t believe someone just corrupted the Cap with, because that’s _his_ job, and Steve just plows through them all. And Steve’s not stingy, so he leaves them out in the unofficial library room to share. (The library has become the unofficial “family” room. There are comfy secondhand chairs and small tables and the huge slouchy (now singed) couch dragged in from places unknown. There are beanbags in a variety of multicolored patterns because the Troll color-coding was bothering Darcy. His interior designer would have vapors.) Some of the books are terrible, like "who-publishes-this-carp? terrible. Some are thinly veiled propaganda. Rose has been seen pilfering anything vaguely Lovecraftian and dragging it off to her den of iniquity. Kanaya’s dapper outfits conceal pockets that have smuggled out all the teen angst vampire schlock. Shouty is deeply, loudly, unashamed of hogging the harlequin romances.

If anyone asks, Tony was totally just meandering through to find something objectionable to use as a coffee coaster or to shore up a table leg (like Tony Stark uses coasters or wouldn’t just make a better robotic roving set of table legs). (Tony rips through scifi with a red pen, leaving a trail of “no, NO, cute, must try” and has a (very secret) nostalgic soft spot for Anne McCaffrey. Because dragons (he’s so going to build a flying robot dragon). And because gestalt (he’s still working on it). And because _The Ship Who Sang_ (he had the biggest 8 year old combo crush and envy) and who doesn’t want to be a spaceship?

Evidently Troll Fascists can ruin anything, cause it’s one thing to be like, “yo, ditch the wheelchair, explore the stairs, that’s how I roll”. And it’s like a universe away to be like, “we’re going to vivisect you, splice in some wires, and if you survive, we’re going to fly your body about like a giant zombie battery, and if you’re lucky there won’t be enough of your mind left to mind the slave programing.”

He thought he’d heard enough at Troll Culture Clift Notes Night, but the Empire is very old, and very good at finding new ways to funk shit up. He kind of wants to hit them with a rolled up copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (have to amend that. Sentient beings? People?) until the Empire just sort of keels over or, you know, Absorbs Some Basic Decency by osmosis or something. Maybe he’ll assign Steve. It will be the irresistible force wearing down the immovable object.

It’s like Loki’s Staff o’MindFucks and his best intentions and freaking HYDRA had a hideous parasitic baby. He’s sick so fast he should win landspeed records. Karkat looks moderately sympathetic (really he’s grimacing, but Tony knows.) “I hope you don’t expect me to pap you better. I’m not that kind of troll.” And Tony knows it’s sympathy because it’s punctuated with “Fucker”. Shouty is totally his favorite.

*

The kids are not alright. Loki is profoundly not alright. The rest of the adults, and he uses the term loosely, have issues. But between Avengers sorties and Vriska’s various PR kerfluffles, they’ve had enough time to carve spaces and routines for themselves, so Tony Stark, Den Mother, convinces Cap that it’s time for a regular Family Movie Night, no really, it’s mandatory, no McSmilydon, we can’t just watch Nicholas Cage, and sets out, with all the power of money and JARVIS, and really that should be sufficient for _anything_ , to institute regular socialization, getting by in America 101, and _to make this weird family work_. Because he doesn’t care how unconventional this is, none of his kids are going to become supervillians. Not even Vriska. No matter how much she wants to be pirate queen.

*

So things do start to settle. The tower’s residential spaces, labs, and offices are pretty full of people. Family really, one way or not, because if you adopt someone, it better be for keeps. They’ve got a teleporting, possibly radioactive dog that grooms Jade’s ears and haunts Bruce’s lab and doesn’t show up on most sensors, and a lecherous rapping robot pony that operates the elevator and asks everyone if they’re “going doooown?”. Things will work out. He’s still got Coulson on speed dial under “ICE Mary Poppins”.


	2. The Stark Family Robinson

Over several months, a routine of sorts coagulates. Most of the kids spend a great deal of their time in one of several of the subbasements, with some exceptions. There’s a common rooms on the midlevel “library” floor that sees a lot of movie nights and library hours.

Egbert prefers a room with windows that open. Ms. Maryam likes the sunlight. Sparky’s apiary lab is halfway up the Tower to allow for better bee access. The Clown haunts the vents. Vriska roams the city. Coulson has moved in.

Darcy resumes swing dancing and Eridan goes with. There’s a persistent software bug in the compiled results for the remaining gamma monitors Bruce set up, and JARVIS hasn’t been able to chase it down yet, even after compensating for the dog. There are three more aquariums in the library common room than the one Tony (JARVIS) ordered. Nepeta prowls out at odd hours, but always returns unharmed, without triggering any vapors in PR, with rarely so much as a tweet to mark her passage. Equius worries anyways.

Aradia, Karkat, Terezi, and Tavros have visited every public museum in the city, with a rotating group of less or more willing volunteers dragged along, usually starting with both the mini-Striders. JARVIS archives the open forum “PesterSnapYourTrap”, commentary and photos that are generated by the general WTF reaction to human culture and history on display. The mini-Striders, (and Tony swears he will someday be able to tell them apart when they’re wearing long sleeves, and you know, determine their names (they can’t both be Dave, can they?!)), are (deliberately?) terrible at explaining. Tony finds the logs soothing bedtime reading and laughs more than should be allowed.

42 goes missing and Tony emphatically does not release a flock of hoverbots to locate it. It was just time to test them. 42 is recovered safely. The hoverbots get names.

There’s no set Family Dinner Night, but it’s not odd to have a certain mass in a common room that seems to attract more attendees until almost everyone is there. Anyone who cooks has learned to use the biggest pots and delegate sides. The Clown becomes a surprisingly good cook for all that he’s as thin as a recovering junkie.

Big Strider carries out his more outré business dealings elsewhere. Tony’s upped the kids’ allowances like an over-indulgent parent. Thor signs for several deliveries of plumbing supplies. Five pianos enter the building. One ends up in John’s room, looming over the bed until it too lands in the library. Four are dragged off into the stygian subbasements.

Most disturbing of all, Loki has taken to passive aggressive critiques that are actually helpful.


	3. Things lost

You are Loki of the names too many to list. You are Loki of the incarnations too many to remember without counting them out on your fingers and writing them down before starting over, and over, and over again, and that you refuse to do. Right now you are Loki, caught between, because this child with a ram’s horns and a queen’s steady gaze seems so very familiar.

She smiles freely, but she is not carefree. She is alive; in her stillness you can hear her heart beat, the rush of air entering and leaving her lungs. And yet, her stillness is not natural to the living.

Her eyes are beautiful, a deep red that is somehow right in ways that you have never been. She does not pursue your presence, nor does she rebuff you, and you sometimes find yourself seeking her, even as you seek the dog-eared one with her bright honest mind and exhausting exuberance, even as you seek the sharp and cynical split-tongued magic-worker immersed in this age’s magic, or the broken-horned artificer, huge as an Asgardian, still growing, but already broken to the saddle of an Empire that may or may not still exist.

They are all such bright flames in your senses. They are not your children. And yet…


	4. Things found

You are Bruce Banner, and for all that you need your alone time, you have started an open yoga session twice a week, barring Avengers work interrupting, and you cannot bring yourself to regret it. Gamzee is your most regular student from the beginning. Feferi is the close second, followed by Tavros, Kanaya, Rose, Darcy, and finally Jane, usually blinking a bit as if she’s not sure how she managed to once again be here on time (the answer is, of course, Darcy). You find yourself fascinated by how troll bodies are put together, make extensive mental notes on where they move differently, how very alike they are overall. You don’t know if your students are representative of general troll physiology or not.

You studied JARVIS’s projections of Vriska’s skeletal and muscle structure during Tony’s evaluation of the interface and rebuilding of a new arm. It was not unlike the younger Strider’s, though his surgery, completed by a SHIELD medical team, was more extensive because it required a port from scratch. They both had thin floating vestigial bones on the upper outer ribs, radiating from the spine, as if evolution had thought to provide them with wings but changed its mind a few moments in.

Feferi yawns one day, and you definitely catch her jaw unhinging and then snapping back in place. Kanaya glows when she meditates. Tavros can’t do all of the positions, but he already has formidable upper body strength and it’s increasing, along with his flexibility. You don’t know the exact nature of his injury, but considering what you’ve learned of Alternia’s value on life, you wonder if there’s anything the SHIELD team can do to help. It’s still too early to go dabbling in major surgery outside of emergencies, but you set the thought aside to discuss with Phil.

Eridan soon gets dragged in by Darcy. The day before you hear her opening salvo in the library: “It’ll do you good – all breathing exercises and stretching – you’ll be even better at swing,” she entices. She doesn’t say, “You really need some self-control techniques that don’t involve the range or hyperventilating.” The negotiation continues and she almost loses him at the workout clothes part, but Mama Lewis didn’t raise any fools. Darcy plies him with pinstriped black yoga pants and a tight tee with his sign picked out in sequins, shows him her matching set like a victory flag unfurling, and it’s a done deal. It’s obvious he knows he’s being managed, but you can’t detect any resentment in his attendance.

Nepeta attends so long as there are plenty of others, and she regularly displays a flexibility to make any of you envious. Steve starts attending when Natasha recommends it, at which point, Clint is already a regular. Natasha and Karkat approach yoga with a similar mien, utter solemnity at pushing their bodies to the limits, with the occasional stare down. Yoga is not meant to be competitive, but they’re quiet about it and you let it pass.

Aradia and Jade may or may not amble in. The Daves protested strenuously and creatively the first time, the entire class heard, but they now regularly attend wearing eye-searing shades of neon spandex and Rose-knitted sparkly legwarmers. You are sure to provide ample stretches and exercises to help offset the effect of the heavier prosthetic on the muscles of the spine.

Sometimes Nepeta cajoles Equius into attending to try to loosen up all his knots, and the crack of his vertebrae is audible as your students stretch. You starts requisitioning towels before sessions, but for all that this was unplanned, the classes really seem to be a positive influence, and you don’t begrudge the extra preparation or the occasional sorting of adolescent issues.

Terezi drags Tavros the first time, and then is seldom seen again until you add a third midweek session more focused on movement than poses. Vriska starts showing up erratically and you have to remind your informal class that yoga is not meant to be competitive. Big Strider starts dragging Middle Strider in, both in neon shorts and tees, minus the legwarmers. Soon the only conspicuously absent individuals are Tony, Thor, Loki, John, and Sollux. At this point, even Phil is a regular, and Pepper has visited a few times when her schedule aligned.

The day that Aradia drags Sollux in shall live in infamy, and, everyone knows, Nepeta’s shipping gallery. Sollux doesn’t stop bitching the entire first 12.53 minutes (one of the Daves attests) and then Aradia gets behind him and gives him a gentle, precise shove, assisted by precise kinesis, obviously a result of extensive observation of both her moirail and all the trolls she’s studied during these sessions. The entire quiet room can hear the crackle-pop of his vertebrae. His eyes are probably wide open behind his glasses, his eyebrows are certainly visible above them, and he just sort of moans and melts down into a puddle of suddenly quiet troll, utterly undone by the sudden absence of a pain so prevalent he had stopped cataloguing it. He doesn’t attend again, but his posture visibly starts to improve and it’s no great deduction to guess that Aradia has continued yoga sessions in privacy. You pull her aside every once in a while to check in on if she needs any further guidance, edge around to how he’s doing. It’s a fine line to tread what with Alternian prickly privacy and the usual fierce staking of clear-cut quadrant and none-quadrant boundaries, but they are, for all their experience, children, all of them, and you can’t in good conscience leave the matter alone, for all that you never swore a Hippocratic oath.

One day when almost everyone is otherwise preoccupied, Nepeta shows up at the regular time, takes one fear-filled look and skedaddles, leaving just you and Gamzee. Gamzee looks sad, but not surprised. You ache for him, for her. You open your mouth, close it. You don’t know what to say. Gamzee replies anyway, though he won’t meet your eyes, is looking at his flexing fingers like they require study.

“Bruce-bro, you all up and being good to me, better mayhaps than this motherfucker deserves, all up and giving me ways to be fixing myself without all stepping in my diamondbro’s territory with your sniffnub, so mayhaps you be deserving of some explanation.

“This here motherfucker done sweet little Kitty-sis a wrong so bad there ain’t no forgiving or forgetting…No matter how many lives be between, you ken? And she weren’t the only one. Nearest thing a motherfucking brother can do is not do no further harm. I got a terrible monster inside, Bruce-brother, and it wants terrible things.”

“I have certain understanding of the feeling.” You manage, and wonder how literal he is, about the monster and the “lives between” both.

“It’s all up and wanting blood, wants to rend and tear and paint. And that don’t fix nothing, just makes it hungrier until a motherfucker is either locking it up right proper, or goes and does something that can’t be fixed. Tried sopor ‘till the worlds ran green, but the beast is still all up and lying in wait.”

“But Bruce-bro,” And he meets your eyes now, sad but determined, like he’s going to ask you for something, and expects to be turned away, but needs to ask anyhow. “I also got a diamond brother so pure and pale, there ain’t no deserving it, but I can’t turn away. Karbro just lifts one of his perfect paws and gets to fixing me so the monster ain’t howling so loud. And Karbro’s got a lot of important things to do, and don’t get half the sleep he ought, and can’t be all up and worrying about a motherfucker all the time. I gotta learn to fix myself before I break him. But a motherfucker don’t want to do no more harm to Kitty-Sis and if someone’s got to all up and leave, it should be me.” He turns away again, like he’s waiting for your judgment. You don’t deserve to judge anyone.

“That won’t be necessary, Gamzee. I’ll speak with Nepeta. I’m sure that she has other activities that she pursues at times, and I suspect that she’ll agree that it’s more important for you to continue to meditate.”

“That’d be real kind, Bruce-bro. …She don’t seem to mind so long as there’s folks in between. Don’t know what Fish-Sis and Glow-Sis and all the rest all had up and going on today.”

You don’t know either. “Why don’t we start without them.” It’s not really a question.

“Ayeup, you’re the headmost-like motherfucker. So iffen you be saying.”

You don’t wince as he mangles grammar, you know what it is to be a stranger in a strange land and his English is always intelligible even when it requires a sort of “slant” hearing. You wonder what he’d think of Emily Dickenson, other earth poets. He’s smarter than he portrays himself. He’s also spilled something very intimate to you and you can’t do less then return that confidence with what support you can manage.

When you finish today, you invite him along to the main kitchen and the two of you get a head start on cooking for lunch or dinner for whenever everyone gets back. Leftovers are usually an endangered species in the tower, and food is a universal flag of truce.

Your name is Bruce Banner. You have never been a parent and such vague notions of the future had died with the advent of the Hulk. In a few months, after continued yoga, cooking, poetry, and a few more revelations (1- Cookbooks get a “Whoa, a motherfucker can all up and make anything.” 2- He takes to poetry like a duck to water. 3- Your continued presence gets a “You already all up and spent more time with this one than the old Goat ever did.”), you will realize that this is the day that Gamzee adopted you.

You will not regret it.


	5. The Epic Quest of Bee XLII of Hive II

Your designation is Bee number 42 of Hive II and you are burdened with glorious purpose.

You are of the between generation that was Alternian bred and hatched here in the Tower, spending the time between, if it existed, inside the sylladex of your Master, himself once a worker in the greater Hive of the Empire. Such philosophical thoughts are not your purview at this time, but they may be in the future.

In the present, you have a problem.

The Tower Hive’s biped Queen requires coffee and there is, due to a variety of unlikely, but indisputably present coincidences, no more to be found on the premises, not even in the red biped’s lair. You have embarked on an epic quest, aided by JARVIS of the Tower internal Hive, and the plastic creditchit it has loaned you. JARVIS has processing power quite possibly exponentially beyond your comprehension and you are in more than a bit of awe. It somehow does not dispute the existence of Hives I and II on its territory, an unexpectedly gracious attitude from a being of such power. Hives I and II have never caught it physically interacting with the Tower and are unsure if its psionics are low level or just always completely committed to whatever its duties are, are no doubt beyond your collective understanding. Either way, it is not really your business.

The creditchit is not heavy, but it is awkward. You are carrying it thin side forward, clasped in all six legs, a coil of strong lightweight thread hanging off your sides. It makes turns difficult but slices you through the air in oddly straight lines. You are not entirely sure how you will get back to the Tower.

You have just cleared the last Tower vent and rest for a moment in preparation before launching yourself. The city is still waking up, the air cool, though the traffic below is already active. Inside the Tower Hive, the biped Queen is likely to wake from his nap amid his pile in the next half hour. Your beeloved mammalian biped Queen, second in your loyalties only to the Master, has an addiction that is mostly harmless, but he gets headaches if he goes without caffeine for too long. However will he resume his duties to the Tower Hive without coffee? Your quest must succeed.

You zip down the two blocks to the hive of the green seadweller, wait for someone to open the door, and zip in after them. There’s only two bipeds in line, but despite the open wireless signal, there’s no electronic interface. How will you order? The sign behind the counter is very long and conflicted. You just need coffee, no sugar, no mammalian squeezings. The line moves up and you are face-to-proboscis with the biped behind the counter.

“Aww, Honeybee, what can I get you?”

This is an unexpectedly friendly greeting. Perhaps he will not attempt to squish you. You plop the creditchit on the counter and he slides forward a smaller print version of the sign on the wall behind the counter. This biped is unexpectedly practical and you are grateful. You tap out an order for two one ounce espressos, amend it to three. You sign the receipt XLII-HII with the tiny graphite stick he pulls from a pocket, and you add a generous tip. The line behind you is empty at the moment. The two bipeds behind the counter prepare your order and you harness yourself to the first one, heat radiating so that you tie the knots as fast as you can.

Ooof. You lift off but don’t think you can make it the two blocks back. You should have called for backup.

“Hold up, Honeybee.” You land and mentally praise the drink lid engineering that you are not scalded in the process. The order biped pulls out another one ounce cup and lid, splits your payload.

“I’ll hold onto the rest of this over here until you can make it back,” he states.

This is acceptable. You launch again. Much better. You loop a gentle circle over his head as a thank you and he beats you to the door without running, props it open wide enough that you can clear it easily leaving and returning. So tractable to training!

You make it the two blocks back to the Tower Hive, drop your payload off at Hive II and leverage it as bribery to recruit more workers.

The next trip goes easily with ten other Bees and more thread. You carry the creditchit back behind them and stash it. The Tower Queen is just waking up and accepts your offerings with gratitude, if not much grace. You plop down in his hair and try to groom it, but it’s a lost cause. You are tired. You fall asleep.

*

Your name is Justin Martin St. Jean. You are a competent though not inspired barista. (You are great with people, can manage the most ornery of New Yorkers come in for their fix, but you couldn’t draw more than a smiley face on a cappuccino if your life depended on it. Fortunately, the one time Dr. Doom came in while you were on duty, he was not interested in doodles. Evidently, he prefers his coffee black with two sugars and no small talk. He also paid with a crisp twenty, left the change, and hasn’t been back since. You wish that his noblesse oblige extended to not involving civilians.) You like the late to early shift when it works with your class schedule because it tends to be quiet, great for finishing some studying, and you’re been lucky that all the coworkers with whom you’ve shared it share your feelings on the matter.

You are also a senior completing your double major in early education and environmental studies and wondering how the heck you’re going to parlay that into a job when you graduate. You love your family but if you have to move back in and share a room with two or more of your six younger siblings you will go stark raving mad. This morning, you have just served the cutest customers you have ever laid eyes on, and you are indeed counting among the competition the adorable mutant middleschooler in a blue cat hat who comes in every week or two for a chai.

Two weeks later you will get a job offer from SI.


	6. Hot and Cold Running Ninja Caterers

Bzzt. You are the fabulous Darcy Lewis and when your Starkphone suddenly vibrates with an incoming message, you drop it and lose your game of Angry Bird Galaga (Why is it so addictive?). You close out and flip over to the message system. “apocalypseArisen has invited you to a forum: P0lyPalePl0tting: Yes?/N0?” Sounds kinky, and kind of adorable.

You wouldn’t bother to deny that the pale porn you’ve seen is as addictive as kitten videos, as shocking as the trolls find your public appreciation. Most of them could do with a dose of self-examination and self-acceptance, and should learn to stop kink-shaming themselves, though one of the reasons you love Aradia is that she’s got that all squared away already. Of course, it’s not a uniquely troll failing by any means. You will admit that yanking John’s chain about natural, healthy sexuality is a group sport that you should probably do more to curb before he develops a complex. Eh. Suffering builds character.

You glance down at Eridan, still asleep, more or less in your lap, sprawled out and pinning your legs to the couch, one arm wrapped around your ribs, the other dangling off the couch, his head a weight just under your rack, each of your shared inhalations not quite enough to bring you to poke yourself on his. You’ve been fooling around online for a while, elbows resting on his shoulders, sound diverted to your earbuds. You have no idea how the vibration and clunk when you dropped your phone on his back failed to wake him. This couch is like the pinnacle of human engineering because, despite the heavy blanket of teenager on top of you, your ass is not asleep.

Over the past couple of months, you have revised your initial impression of him. Eridan is still an entitled ass but he’s an ass with potential and a willingness to learn, which is more than some of your previous serious relationships had going for them. His negative traits are also paired with a surprising potential sweetness, and an eagerness to please, once you get through the thick outer candy-coating of jerk.

It’s new to you that this is a serious-more-than-friends relationship without any sexuality, what humans might call deep platonic friends, (though trolls would find that descriptor horrifying), but it’s also surprisingly nice. You also emphatically don’t want to consider a 16 year old as a human-style “boyfriend”, that’s just pervert territory. You may someday make for a Kickass Cougar Sugar Mama, but your early twenties is not yet the time. But seeing him trust you so much that he pretty much drops off whenever you pet his hair and face makes something in you more protective than you anticipated, a regular (if amazing) human, surrounded by so many superhero heavy-hitters. You brush a hand through his hair and flick a horn. He shifts his head but doesn’t wake, still out like the proverbial light.

It’s late and you both smell a bit ripe from hours of swing dancing. You should probably both be in bed, or, in his case, buried in a pile of junk padded by several hundred dollars of scarves, but the tower is full of unconventional interpretations of the day/night/sleep-when-we’re-dead cycle. You’re on a couch in a rarely frequented common room, private by default. It is unfair that after so many hours of exercise he smells mostly like salt and maybe the umami of seaweeds or hair product when you get a distinctive eau de skunk under your arms. It’s funny how in privacy this makes him want to cuddle so close, like he wants to smell like you. You are absolutely positive that he is the _only_ person who has _ever_ had an obsession with the valley between your boobs that has nothing to do with your “rumblespheres” and everything to do with how it channels sweat and therefore smells the most like whatever chemistry equals Darcy Lewis. It is an intimacy that humbles you, not that that will prevent you from teasing him about it.

When you got back you had crowded into the elevator, raided the fridge (blessings on whoever had made a pot of ziti, spinach, anchovies, and meatballs large enough that there were leftovers after the herds came and went), and collapsed on the couch. Your dirty plates and forks and glasses are still on the table, your shoes tumbled together underneath. The fluffy layer of your skirt crunches whenever one of you shifts.

You love how confident swing has made him. Not the haughty the-world-owes-me attitude that you’ve been trying to strip from him, bit-by-bit, but the honest, smiles-freely-confidence of a competent lead. He’s popular with the swing group now, has an almost flawless sense of rhythm and, since he’s finally accepted the idea that people in his space don’t necessarily want to stab him or fuck him, is a supportive and intuitive partner with whomever he dances. (If most trolls can move like he can, you’d pay to see troll tango. If trolls don’t have tango, or its equivalent, they are clearly failing at the full potential of kismesissitude.)

There’s something very heady about the strength with which he can make his partners float and fly, and does it (now at least) without becoming threatening. It’s not just the under thirty contingent that wants a whirl, his manners, now that he uses them, make him very popular with the intimidating and hilarious granny brigade. He has blossomed under the attention. You are not telepathic, nor empathic beyond the normal range of human sympathy, and yet you know that he feels the same addiction that you do, the sense of something perfect when two bodies and minds sync perfectly with the music and each other, the joy in pushing to be better, faster, more precise. It is heady stuff to find someone who understands.

You are Darcy Lewis and your personal motto is “Don’t be Evil.” You have a hold on this boy that could tear him apart or reassemble him unrecognizably. You want him to become the best of what he can be. You have to be very careful that this is not just what Human Darcy thinks is best, but what is right for him. From what you understand, he is likely to live until some violence does him in, or until “men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits”, to quote a fragment of your childhood. Some might argue that your hold on him is therefore already cruel. You believe that if he is to outlive most of you, he absolutely needs to connect before the chance races by. You can all too easily picture him, centuries from now, as lost as Loki, as dangerous. You have considered and acknowledged this, and since set it aside, a truth too sharp to handle daily, just as you know he has killed, even if the definition of Alternia seems to be “extenuating circumstances”. You are probably in over your head. That has never stopped you before.

You hit “yes” and the intro screen asks if you’re up for keeping the game confidential. You hit “yes” again and are greeted with animated foodstuffs and “Welcome to Calorie Countess. Who shall reign supreme?” You still have no idea what this is about, but Aradia is generally awesome, so you don’t mind the wait to find out. A tiny cute crown of vegetables fades out to text:

AA: At issue: T0ny Stark’s c0ntinued g00d health is t0 the benefit 0f every resident 0f the t0wer.

AA: At issue: TS is n0t very g00d at remembering t0 take breaks, eat, 0r sleep, despite JARVIS’s best eff0rts.

AA: At issue: TS is n0t the 0nly 0ne in the t0wer with this pr0blem. Exhibit II: TA.

AA: At issue: AA wants t0 get t0 the Smiths0nian in Washingt0n, DC, and as much as she likes dead things, wishes t0 keep her m0irail am0ng the living.

AA: Pr0p0sed s0luti0n: Delegate 0fficially.

AA: At issue: Awkward f0r every0ne inv0lved.

AA: Pr0p0sed s0luti0n: C0mpetitive Challenge t0 feed the finicky and hydrate the haggard with0ut being caught 0ut as c0mpeting. JARVIS will keep sc0re and arbitrate any disagreements. The f00d 0nly c0unts if the target c0nsumes it. Aut0matic disqualificati0n f0r deliberately feeding any0ne anything that makes them sick.

The words scroll up and you notice that AA is not the only other attending: JARVIS, arsenicCatnip [AC], adiosToreador [AT], and gallowsCalibrator [GC], are already listed, as is your own DivaLicious [DL]. grimAuxiliatrix [GA] and tentacleTherapist [TT] join as you watch.

apocalypseArisen [AA] is sending list.stk

AA: Attached is the list 0f viable targets and the f00d sc0ring. There are different acceptable f00ds f0r each and the sc0ring can vary between individual targets. The targets and p0ints als0 change acc0rding t0 their current status.

AA: If y0u bring the target f00d and drink and they c0nsume it, alm0st anything will get y0u s0me p0ints if the target is TA 0r TC, but the greater p0ints are f0r nutriti0nally advisable items. Please d0 n0t bring my m0irail M0nster and Twinkies and n0thing but while I am away. Y0u may find his manic phases entertaining but the crash is unkind and it will make me VERY CRANKY.

AA: Bringing Jane F0ster P0ptarts d0esn’t c0unt unless it’s been 0ver 24 h0urs since she last ate. A healthy diet’s diversity, even f0r humans, is n0t determined by different c0l0rs 0f t0aster pastries 0r Fayg0.

AA: Bringing TS c0ffee and f00d after he’s been awake 20 h0urs will result in negative p0ints if he ign0res the f00d but drinks the c0ffee.

AA: Y0u 0nly get p0ints fr0m the Striders if y0u get them t0 eat actual fruits 0r vegetables 0r rec0gnizable pr0tein 0r carbs; AJ, jerky, and Cheet0s d0n’t c0unt.

AA: CB is 0nly a target if he misses tw0 meals in a r0w, same f0r GG. P0st-Hulk BB has higher p0ints that regular BB.

AA: C0nsult JARVIS if y0u have questi0ns. Y0u d0n’t have t0 c00k it y0urself. If y0u get it f0m 0utside the t0wer, y0u have t0 acquire it legally. Y0u can share a task and split p0ints, with an0ther player 0r with JARVIS.

AA: Any questi0ns?

GC: Sm3lls d3l1c1ous. 1 4cc3pt your ch4ll3ng3.

DL: I’m in.

AT: tHIS sOUNDS uSEFUL, aND aLSO, mAYBE, pOSSIBLY fUN, iF, aH, a tAD uNCONVENTIONAL.

GC: Fl4gr4ntly prom1scuous, you m34n.

AT: aH, yES, tHAT tOO.

AA: Is any0ne here really 0bjecting? If we’re the last tr0lls, why sh0uld the empire get t0 dictate h0w we judge 0urselves, h0w we live 0ur lives?

GC: 4 po1nt, 1nd33d.

GA: I Admire Efficiency, However, I Am Concerned That The Discovery Of The Game Will Undo Any Good It Might Accomplish.

TT: Likewise. The realization of manipulation could both undo any gains made and regress some of the progress we have made as a group to trust one another, to an extent.

AA: Then d0n’t get caught.

AC: The fierce but quiet huntress is quite certain that GA and TT can empurrloy their wits and grace to remain impurrceptible. Do GA and TT f33l that their expurrtise is insufficient?

TT: Phrased like that, however could we abjure such opportunity? Ms. Maryam, would you care to affiliate for this affair?

GA: I Would Be Quite Pleased To Partner With You, Ms. LaLonde. We Will Compete As A Pair. An Outfit, If You Will.

AC: :33

AC: The hunting here is pawful, but that just makes it a challenge!

JARVIS: Miss Leijon, I would be most happy to order whatever you require, and as I am lacking in hands to prepare it, perhaps you might assist. However, I must advise most strenuously against consuming any animal hunted in the city.

AC: The fearsome huntress accepts your purrposal of alliance!

GC: On3 hop3s th4t the judg3 w1ll r3m41n gl4c14lly unmov3d 1n judgm3nt.

JARVIS: Indubitably.

AT: aH, pERHAPS, tHE jUDGE iS oPEN tO oTHER aLLIANCES aS wELL? mAYBE?

JARVIS: Most observant of you, young sir. My concern is for the safety and continued health of my charges, among which you are all counted as well. This directive takes precedence over any individual competition circumstance. I am, in fact, quite prepared to assist each of you. In the context of this game, it will cost you each some form of points, but I am here to assist outside of it as well.

DL: Pretty sure you just ascended to being the only adult on the premises, J.

JARVIS: I assure you, Ms. Lewis, it is not a novel experience.

DL: Good thing you’ve got lots of entertainment incoming. One might even say, “Dance, my puppets, dance!”

JARVIS: I assure you, Ms. Lewis, I have the greatest of respect for the sanctity of free will.

DL: I didn’t mean to imply otherwise, J. That joke just fell flatter than the Witch of the East in Oz. Would you accept an apology?

JARVIS: I would accept one favor in the future in lieu of an apology. A dance of my choice, if you will. Would that be acceptable?

DL: As I trust your ethical integrity, I’m going out on a limb here and agreeing without establishing terms. But, Jarvis? I’d save a dance for you any day, no favors needed.

JARVIS: I am most flattered, Ms. Lewis.

AC: Does the huntress purrceive <3 in the wind?

DL: Naw, Nep, that’s mostly the human disease called friendship. Maybe a slight crush. Competence is *awfully* sexy after all.

JARVIS: Your confidence is safe with me, Ms. Lewis.

DL: Aw, J, you’re just fanning the flames here. Give a gal some time to pull it together.

AA: N0w f0r the wildcards:

AA: L0ki is a valid target but p0int sc0ring directly depends 0n his behavi0r in the 12 h0urs f0ll0wing. If it makes JARVIS unhappy, negative p0ints f0r y0u!

AA: Karkat is n0t invited, but that d0esn’t mean he can’t play. If he g0es 12 0r m0re h0urs awake with0ut f00d, he’s a valid target. If he gets 0ne 0f the targets t0 eat, he earns the same p0ints a player w0uld. If y0u are the reas0n he finally catches 0n t0 what is g0ing 0n, y0ur p0ints are halved and he gets them. Same f0r GG, BB, CB, and PC.

AA: C00king f0r the gr0up earns y0u p0ints in additi0n t0 what are c0nsumed by the current listed valid targets.

AA: Direct0r Fury aka The G0lden Snitch, is w0rth 1,000 p0ints. If y0u can get him t0 c0nsume anything within the t0wer, b0ttled water included, instant p0ints b00st, but y0u have t0 survive it.

AA: If y0u surprise J0hn with cake, aut0matic 20 p0ints, n0 cake c0nsumpti0n necessary. Particularly spectacular reacti0ns will be upgraded acc0rdingly.

B39HI: Bee 39, Hive I posits that challenge should not be limited to bipeds.

B42HII: Bee 42, Hive II posits that Hive II can beat Hive I with 2 sets of legs tied up.

B39HI: Bee 39, Hive I posits that Hive II should spend less time with its legs up self-abusing and more time worrying about being Beeten. In other words: prepare to be fricked!

B42HII: Bee 42, Hive II posits that Bee 39, Hive I once again suffers from displaced emotional projection and could not find magnetic north with a compass and a pictographic manual. In other words: are you lost, larva?

AA: NO MIND HONEY.

B42HII: Yes, Ma’am!

B39HI: We’ll wash our feet.

AA: Okay, Bee-earned points get a x3 factor, which should also make it easier to form alliances. NO MIND HONEY. Or I’ll pluck your feet off myself.

AA: Any 0ther questi0ns?

DL: Pardon me if I’m putting my foot in it, but is there a reason Feferi isn’t in on this?

AT: i’M nOT qUITE sURE, aH, oF WHAT yOU mEAN bY fOOT. bUT tHAT iS, aH, a qUESTION oF cONCERN tO mE, aS wELL.

AA: If CC helps, she sh0uld get her 0wn sc0re tally. But c0nsidering h0w pathetic TA is, I d0n’t want to break them up 0ver this if CC can’t keep the quadrants apart and TA flips 0ver it.

DL: AA, so romantic and yet so jaded.

GA: I Fail To See What Is Jade About This.

GC: I f41l to s33 1t 4s w3ll. >B] > B] >B]

DL: Tav-dear, putting my foot in my mouth is an American expression for saying the wrong or awkward thing. And Kanaya, if you’re claiming that you don’t know what “jaded” means in American idioms, I’m not buying whatever you’re selling. Perhaps Rose ought to assist you if you’re having problems with the local patois. She does seem to have a gift for tongues.

GC: >B] > B] >B]

AT: i tHINK i gOT tHAT aND, wOULD, aH, lIKE tO rEQUEST tHAT wE mOVE aLONG nOW, iF, tHAT iS, aH, aLRIGHT.

AA: D0ne?

turntechGodhead [TG] has joined

TG: wait, hold up, my Timelicious-sis.

FAA: D0ne.

apocalypseArisen [AA] has closed the forum. This conversation has been archived. Place standings and information available by request from JARVIS.

TG: dammit.

dovelyShrike [DS] has joined archive

DS: Pwnd. AA: 10; TG: 8. I warned you bro.

TG: shut it *dove*.

DS: Why must you stab me so? And here when I was going to extend the olive branch, that being what doves do, and ask if you wanted to team up, like Daves squared, awesome so concentrated you have to don your eye protection like an underwater welder in full SCUBA gear. But *you’re* being a square, dude. The bridge will fall down. You burned it. Where will the trolls like you live?

dovelyShrike [DS] has signed off of archive

TG: dammit2.

*

Your name is Dirk Strider. You are generally amazing and just wish the world could keep up. (You’re kind of a dick at times.) If pressed, you’d admit (in the privacy of your mind) that working with older you, Pony-boy, JARVIS, Sparky, and Tony-Stark-Raving-Bonkers (he’s way too much like you) is rather, well, nice, even if not everyone is perhaps entirely cognizant of all the projects everyone else is running. You even like Jade, and she has a tendency to correct you (this is otherwise inexcusable but even you are not immune to the unholy powers of her buckteeth and puppy ears) and to fall asleep on top of your stuff.

If forced (under torture), you’d even admit that you might possibly miss Jake and his stupid bucktooth grin, ridiculous over-the-top mannerisms, and plush Lara Croft bubble butt. You might even miss that d-bag Hal. You really do miss Roxy and Jane, but you try not to think about it. You’re working as fast as you can, but even Sparky hasn’t been able to detect Roxy’s daiquiri bubblegum communiques. Maybe they don’t exist. Surrender is for losers.

Meanwhile, your bombastic brain is overly engrossed with the issue of something that really shouldn’t take up so much of your valuable thinking time.

What is the deal with all these crudité platters? Meh, the carrots are alright, but almondbutter just lacks the tensile strength to keep your celery towers upright. How will you properly tease Pony-boy if he can’t decipher your horse schlong ironic love notes before they fall flaccid?

*

Your name is, in this universe, Broderick Strider. You are probably somewhere between 31, 34, and who even knows. Over the past few weeks, there have been a steady stream of sandwich and crudité platters, thermoses of milk and bottles of icy water, creeping into the lab via a variety of methods and people, like the world’s most elite corps of hot and cold running ninja caterers. Watching mini-me steadily get more freaked out about it is hilarious, but he’s missing the point.

You juggle some cherry tomatoes, walk one over the back of your hands, flick it up and catch it, bite down to the satisfying tart squirt of tomato slime and seeds. You flick one at mini-me, who catches it before it hits the back of his head, frowns at you. You flick another up and catch it, monkey-see. He flicks his higher and snaps his teeth down on it with a click, monkey-do.

You were an 18 year old single parent. You don’t waste food, especially fresh produce. He’ll learn.


	7. #NYCSmallMediumAtLarge

You are Aradia Megido and you are serene in the face of a supernatural storm.

Behind you, your horns confirm, but you already know, Karkat, Terezi, Dave, and Dove are watching your back, surrounding Tavros in his wheeled chair. Terezi has her cane, no sword blade. The others have only themselves, though it would not surprise you if at least one of them has a small concealed blade.

Anthony Stark is a Power in this city. You have all been most fortunate to land in the patronage of an eccentric adult that seems to expect little in return for his protection. Yet Tony has his own enemies, as do the Avengers. And there are those who would harm you for being what you are. On this world, trolls are _all_ “mutants”.

You all have to balance the possibility of police search with the necessity of feeling comfortable enough in public to not be _accidentally_ dangerous. Just because you are not looking to cause trouble, does not mean that it will not find you, and leave you to deal with the consequences. A psionic is seldom entirely unarmed. You don’t ask how your companions cope.

Going entirely unarmed makes your mishmash family-clade twitchy. Against ghosts, it is unlikely that that whatever they can manage will do much but agitate the dead further. Still, if they can remain unafraid, the potential damage is limited.

You will not let it come to that.

It’s not the most dangerous part of night yet, not a particularly dangerous part of the city, but dusk is falling through the canyons of cityscape and you are all surrounded by a swirling of ghosts, now a tower like a waterspout, now a spinning galaxy shape with two outreached arms. There are so many you can’t hear them clearly, though you try. Ghosts are rarer on this world than Alternia. So too are those who can hear, can be heard, can lay them to rest. Some of them have been waiting a very long time.

*

Earlier today you had all made your third trip to the American Museum of Natural History. Your area of interest skews toward the bones and artifacts of dead peoples, but you can appreciate the majesty of the assembled skeletons of extinct dragons and prehistoric monsters that no longer hunt the indigenous populations.

You can also appreciate the fine artistic taxidermy, though in the halls of flapbeasts, it is not Terezi who you’d bet most likely to lick the displays, but Dave. You pay your resident coolkid no mind, he’d be embarrassed if you pointed it out. Dove, an informal name still, his legal documents all title him Dave S. Strider, just as his other-self is Dave E. Strider, goes still at the passenger pigeon case, as he has the past two visits. You all have weak spots.

The first time, you had read the placard and left him to his thoughts. You can’t really point fingers at humans for atrocities when Alternia was so much worse in most ways, though due to you second trip, you know Eridan certainly has plenty to say about the stupidity of culling a useful species by _accident_.

This time you give Dove a few minutes and then, when you can hear the rest of your group leave the New York Mammals section for the North American Birds section, you gently hook elbows with him and tow him off. He tows easily, like Sollux in one of his milder phases, like Dave without his more prickly bits, and you can admit that you are quite fond of him. You are also fond of this new world, where such contact doesn’t have to be a big deal unless you make one of it.

Your group covers much of the museum, focusing on the areas of most interest. Feferi and Nepeta came the first visit, so you are all familiar with the animal and ocean sections. Kanaya, Rose, Darcy, and Eridan had joined your group on the second visit and you had covered the whole museum again, plus the planetarium show. You already know that these stars are not your stars, the pale moon is not either of yours, but the guided tour of simulated space made them seem just a little more friendly.

You think that Jade might like the show, but you are waiting to ask her along until after the project in the subterranean level is finished. She might want to build her own and doesn’t need more distractions than living with everyone already brings. Those of you doing reconnaissance on your new world outside the tower are mostly those who can’t do much to assist with the project in the basement.

You spend some of the visit just watching the other visitors: schoolfeeding groups and their chapadrones, parent-lusi and charges, a few wrigglers your age, a few stray adults. The museum employees are used to your group at this point, and you’re sure they’ve seen stranger. One of the docents gives you a conspiratorial grin. The schools of children treat you like a wandering part of the exhibits. The three of you Flarpers don’t mind most of time, it’s just like assuming a character identity that is mostly you.

Karkat hates to be stared at but he’s also surprisingly good with children. No one cries, even when he tells one wriggler who asks if he can pick his nose without cutting himself with his claws, “That is a stupid and disgusting question, because the answer is yes, but why would I? Do you stab your eyes out because you have opposable thumbs? Ask something better.” The child wants to know which restroom he uses. “Whichever one’s cleaner. Who wants to commune with the intestinal flora of a group of strangers drawn together only by their need to defecate explosively?” This earns a giggle from the whole schoolfeeding group. Later you pass the group in front of the restrooms while the hapless chapedrones try to get them inside and the wrigglers mutiny. They want to inspect both sides first.

You stop for lunch at a shop that specializes in sandwiches and coffee, and save the crusts and a few bits of salad. You plan to spend several hours wandering through Central Park so that Tavros can rest his mind against the birds, the small tree animals, and his favorites here, the carriage hoofbeasts, horses. He’s careful not to influence them, but you suspect he heaps them with praise, as the horses that pass you step out more energetically, toss their heads proudly. You wish people could be so easily happy. Sometimes you go to the zoo, but as much as Tavros loves the animals, many of them make him sad.

The group of you walk, and roll, sporadically along the shore to feed the crusts and salad bits to the ducks. You stop when you recognize a certain shape of shore and water meeting, glance to the others. Karkat and Dave both have their heads tilted precisely the same, inverse mirrors of one another, frowning alike. They don’t notice each other. Terezi has a hand on her hip, other hand on her firmly planted cane, feet spread in a stable and aggressive stance, inhaling great deep breaths, exhaling, and starting again with delicate sniffs instead. It’s Tavros who pins it down.

“Does, ah, anyone else think, they, maybe, recognize this? And are, maybe, perhaps, a bit annoyed, for some reason?”

“Eridan!” Snaps out Karkat and growls so loud the ducks scatter.

“Whoa, man, hold up this train of wild hoofbeasts! Batten down your hatches and unhatched. You mean this is where the Master of Ridiculous Scarves comes with his All-American-Sensei to be an artiste in the wild? These cute and innocent little quack and flap beasts are the source of his creepy anatidaephobia-laden propaganda?”

“I, ah, am not entirely sure of what you said, but I suspect the answer is yes, this is where they paint, sometimes, when they are not, painting elsewhere.”

“Are, like, Alternian quackbeasts masters of evil and plotting or something?”

“Ah, Mr. AJ, they are not! They are however, quite venomous, if delicious when prepared correctly! They do not have very efficacious teeth,” and without looking, you know that her pause is to display her own, “but they tend to bring their prey down by mobbing it and nibbling it to death, one poison-laden peck at a time.”

“Earth ducks are kind of gross for at least two reasons, but not venomous unless this world is a lot weirder than the obvious… and I think we would have noticed that in one of the museums by now. If you want to go to Chinatown for dinner we can get some Peking duck and you can compare.”

Dave glares at Dove for saying this, as if he’s asked Terezi on a flush or pale date in front of his other-self for the exclusive purpose of rubbing it in that Dave didn’t first. You look at Karkat and Tavros and they’re rolling their eyes in unison.

Karkat, always on the lookout for Dave’s weaknesses, looks like he wants to ask him if he’s flipped pitch for Dove. They aren’t, they are in some ways, you all (mostly) try not to poke too much, a unit, just not a clean-cut quadrant. If anything, they are closest to pale, just closer to the romantic-comedy genre than the romantiquest.

Dove is silent in response, arms crossed. Dave sees Karkat abstaining from saying anything, Tavros rolling himself back a bit further from the pond and setting the brake. Terezi is grinning at him as she waits for him to gather himself or explode. If you were all nicer, you’d start walking again, provide a distraction. You don’t. Dave’s motormouth finally runs out of patience.

“Thank you, oh messenger of barnyard philosophy and travel guides. However would we determine where to find some decent grub in this vast and barren place? We might travel forever without succor or sustenance, but you, oh savior of the wretched, you are the weathervane at the top of this hoedown barn raising party, determined to do your duty despite a multitude of pigeons perched on your flighty ass. Any more advice?”

“Duck.” It’s Tavros who replies, and it it’s directed at both of them. There’s a sort of chirr and whirl of wings in the air. They turn away from each other to him and their faces show mirrored surprise.

There are no ducks. Rather, Dove gets flocked by the small fat gray-and-rainbow birds native to the city. He tries, and fails, to hide behind Dave, who laughs and pushes him away. There are first two that land on Dove, then five, then probably about a dozen, in a flurry of wings and loud burbling coos that make it impossible to count accurately. They land on his head, his shoulders, his arms when he raises them to try to urge them off. They cling to his shirt. One manages to tumble down the neck and he tries to catch it, disturbing all the ones on his arms. He extracts the tumbler and the arm birds come back, they try to cuddle close like they’re courting him. It is adorable and hilarious and you try not to laugh at him. Your group is already attracting attention.

Tavros frowns and tries to move them off. The flock reluctantly moves away, except for the two on Dove’s shoulders, one on each, heads tucked under his chin, tiny, symmetrical, very determined suitors. Another reluctant bird has seceded to Dave and refuses to be moved. All three tiny suitors are puffed bigger than they ought to be. Dave’s is strutting, and he is no longer laughing. Karkat and Terezi are clearly enjoying his discomfort. Karkat is snapping pictures for PesterSnapYourTrap, and you suspect that the keyword will be something like “MR_AND_MR_BIRDBRAIN”.

Finally, between Dove and Tavros, the last of your strange visitors fly off. Dave, equilibrium restored, proclaims Dove the patron saint of cockroach birds, tells him, “Aww, bro, those little rock dove dudes just want to rock your world”. One of the birds circles and makes a deposit on him. From Tavros’s frown, that wasn’t something he encouraged, or something that the bird ought to have understood. You wonder if Dave spoke more truly, if unwisely, than he knew. You are all not quite as you once were. That is the nature of life, and possibly dimensional travel. Terezi snaps a shot of the tidy bit of aiming and Dave’s disgusted face and you suspect that this one will go under some variation of “Stool_P1g3on_Just1c3”.

You continue your walk without further oddities than the usual human reactions (1- stare, 2- at all costs don’t make eye contact, 3- children (no filters whatsoever, they are all hilarious incarnations of PastKarkat), and 4- preadolescents and teenagers: “Are you, like, in a band? Can I have a photo?”). Dave suffers to let the bird spot dry before he flicks it off.

Peking duck hours later is indeed delicious, as is the whole fish brought to the table still with most of the good bits, and all the rest of the dishes you order. Human food just has so much variety!

During the wait, Dave and Terezi attempt to use their short eating sticks to try to duel each other and you confiscate them until they can be used as intended. You are careful to avoid visible psionics whenever possible, but a tumble of sticks dropping to the table and their inexplicable inability to pull them up is easier to overlook than, say, the howl if someone actually got stabbed. You are relieved that Dove is between Dave and Karkat, a buffer zone so that they might insult one another, but probably won’t come to blows at the table. You distract them by reading the placemats and hope that the other patrons are tolerant of wrigglers.

Dave makes up increasingly ridiculous explanations for the zodiac signs. Terezi is satisfied to determine that she is a Dragon, regardless of actual year of wriggling, whether or not that even remains relevant. Tavros is content to be a named an Ox in a similar manner, and you all while away the rest of the wait teasing Dave about being a Rooster and trying to pin down Karkat’s inner animal on a system that doesn’t have crabs.

Dave and Karkat get into an argument over the Monkey and the Pig. Dave contends that Pigs are disgusting as they sleep in their excrement. Karkat maintains that Monkeys throw theirs, and also, have the misfortune to resemble Dave. Terezi proposes that the only way to test this latter theory is by providing the snow monkeys at the zoo with sunglasses. Tavros is consulted to break the tie and the waitress kindly shows up with the first of your order before he has to pick.

Karkat charms the youngest member of the wait staff with his obvious savoring of every last bit, a first for reactions to Karkat’s aggressive table manners, but he lets you have the fish eye, a rare treat for an inlander.

When the rest of the table, without psionics, can’t quite manage to eat the grain dishes without dropping bits, you requests forks for everyone. Sometimes you feel that you are the oldest of your compatriots.

The youngest of the wait staff is a human girl maybe about your age. She shyly asks if she could take your picture for their Facebook page. She gestures at the wall by the door where photos show a variety of humans enjoying their meals. You survey the table. Karkat’s face is only at normal levels of grumpy, and no one has outright objected. She bounces in place with Nepeta’s enthusiasm and snaps several shots before another waiter shoos her off and refills you water glasses.

When the meal concludes, all of you have made a sizable dent in your order, washed down with several pots of tea. You resolve to bring Nepeta next time. Then again, even Equius might like the variety of vegetarian dishes, your moirail would love the sweetened meat dishes as much as Karkat, Rose certainly would be a better educational source than Dave, Kanaya would no doubt like to hear it as well, and Jade would appreciate that they didn’t take out all the good parts before the dish hit the table. Even the seadwellers could get plenty of fish and Eridan might like the duck.

The human expression is that revenge is a dish best served cold, but you prefer to consume your meals at the temperature optimal for your enjoyment. You might need to arrange an expedition.

You survey the leftovers and order more, pay with the generous creditchit. You leave a tip for the wait staff and hope it is fair compensation for not making a big issue out of 1-trolls, and 2-Dave, Terezi, and Karkat’s manners.

You are all leaving without incident until you reach the entrance, flanked by a fish tank on one side and a counter and register by the wall. Behind the counter with its wall of photos is a shrine and a ghost. It’s not the first you’ve seen here, there are ghosts throughout the city, though less than on Alternia. Some live in the subway systems and seem content to just ride, swaying with the rest of the commuters. There’s a child ghost in the Robert Bendheim playground in Central Park. The ghost waits for the wind to push the swings and then hops aboard. There’s a police officer a few neighborhoods from the tower who walks their beat without fail, decades after they last walked it in their body. And in the worst parts of the city, in alleys, and under bridges, there are ghosts huddled among the living, and neither seem to notice the other, if the former have even noticed their transition at all.

This ghost is unusual in that you are already within the area she regards as her own and she is already watching you back. When Dave opens the door you can hear her say something, but you can’t quite hear it. The ghost isn’t malevolent, just sad, maybe a little frustrated. You are in her space and she’s fairly new. It would be discourteous not to inquire. “I’m sorry,” you say in English with a gentle push of your gift. She focuses on you more completely. “Do you need something?” Dave pauses, and the door softly shuts again.

“Yes. Grandchildren!” This is snapped in English, the intonations the particular cant you now know to be pure New Yorker, surprisingly forceful from a spirit who seemed just a moment before to be almost insubstantial. Her form firms up until you could see that she only looks to be middle-aged for a human.

You can’t guess how she died, some ghosts carry their wounds and some don’t. Of course, either way, there are ways to die visually untouched. She is impeccably made up and dressed. You think that you might have liked her if you had known her when she lived, not that that precludes liking her now.

“I can’t help with that directly. Is there something else I can do?”

“You can deliver a message.” It is said with enough force that you know she is bargaining with you now, and with each response, you wind yourself deeper together into whatever covenant the two of you hammer out. In your peripheral vision Tavros and Dave both look a bit uncomfortable. Your focus is making her more visible.

“What kind of message, and to whom?”

“Tell my son Joseph to quit faffing around already and propose to his girlfriend. She’ll say yes. But he needs to ask! Nina can’t wait forever! I probably can’t either, not that it makes a difference at this point.” She tosses her hands in the air, with an expressive shrug of “what-can-you-do?”.

“Is that all?”

“You can tell him that for every day he waits, I’ll toss one of his precious Pez dispensers out a window. I’ll give him a head start of one week.” You don’t know what a Pez dispenses but this has the intonation of a contract, just as you know that she is being utterly truthful to you, at least the truth as she understands it. Ghosts can refuse to speak to you, can try to trap you, but they cannot lie to you. You don’t doubt that now that she has your attention, now that the two of you are negotiating, if politely, she can and will follow through.

“Anything else?”

“It is ridiculous.”

“I won’t promise anything, but you might as well tell me before I leave, I might not be back for a while.”

“Some dragon-skin tofu every once in a while would be satisfactory. Rice is filling, but…”

“I’ll ask. How about a pork bun to tide you over?”

“That would do nicely.”

You all set your bags on the counter and have a brief treasure hunt trying to remember who is carrying the pork buns. Dove wins and he opens the takeout container with a nod to both the ghost and you.

Until now you have been quiet enough to be unremarkable to patrons and employees both. You lean over the counter to place it by the shrine (visible psionics tend to make humans nervous) and an employee rushes over behind the counter.

“Ah, Miss? Did you need something?” He does not quite dare to say, “What do you think you’re doing?!”

“That’s my Joseph, defending his mother’s quaint practices, sweet boy. If only he had guts to stand up for himself…” Without a need to breathe, ghosts can sign almost endlessly.

“Ah, yes, actually. Perhaps you’d like to sit. I have a message for a Joseph.”

He pales, glances at the shrine, and looks ready to stagger. You prepare to catch him if he falls but don’t want to touch him with your psionics unless absolutely necessary. He looks older than Natasha and younger than Bro. You feel bad about scaring him, but if he’s this nervous now, next week he will be terrified if you don’t finish.

“Nothing bad, I promise!” You smile and try to convey honesty. This doesn’t seem to put him any more at ease. He gropes for the chair behind him. You wait for him to coordinate it enough to sit.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” He nods.

“The good news is that it’s a great time to ask her to marry you! In fact, in about a week, if you can’t quite determine how, someone’s going to start rooting for you, like your own personal cheerleader, clearing out the old to make room for your new life! But you shouldn’t wait, you should ask her tomorrow. Tomorrow is a most fortuitous day!”

“What if she says no?” It’s whispered, and you know you have him, and it’s good that Sollux and you are both shameless, because you are doing the verbal equivalent of publicly papping a stranger. Tavros has turned toward the fish tank, at a perfect level for his chair. He’s running a finger over the side and you can feel the fish following it.

“I think she wants to say yes, but she’s afraid if she asked YOU, you’d say no.” He shakes his head and you think of Sollux. You’d never have become moirails if you had waited for him to make the first move. You are pretty sure Joseph’s mother is right on this one, even without meeting Nina.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll come back next week and you can tell me how well it went or we can think of ways you can ask her. Karkat here is great at romance!” You gesture at Karkat and poor Joseph gulps. Karkat’s smile clearly conveys the expression, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you”, the one that means exactly the opposite.

Dove is slowly and studiously restacking the takeout containers for the third time, facing the wall like it’s very, very interesting, just look at all this wood grain. Terezi and Dave are politely turned away pretending to admire the décor, or possibly plotting to borrow one of the gorgeous red lanterns. You need to finish up.

“I heard that you make a great dragon-skin tofu here and would love to try it! Next week. When we visit. I bet your mother would love some too!” He pales again.

“Is she unhappy?” You hesitate. Up until now you haven’t actually said anything directly attributed to his mother.

“She’s sad that you’re not as happy as you could be.” And you think that this is the kindest way to summarize the whole situation, one that covers most people to some extent, and you will spare one last pap for this stranger.

“Do you think you can ask Nina? Life can be shorter than we expect. If she says no, at least you can both move on.” He nods and turns away just a bit and you know that he is trying not to cry. His mother clearly died before most humans expect to. It’s time to get out of here before it gets even more awkward.

“Good luck! See you in a week!” And you herd everyone out the door.

On the street again, Tavros let you hang the bags off of his wheeled chair so everyone can keep their hands free. You stroll off to head home. And that is when it gets complicated.

*

In the present you are grasping for the hook, the focus of the storm. In a way, the focus is you, but you did not summon them, you are positive of this, and you don’t know if something you did focused them, or if someone or something focused them on you. You have been politely but firmly trying to slow the whirling so as to focus on individuals, but they are too frantic. You are about to take a page from Karkat’s pressed vegetation bound manual on flipping entirely off the handle in acrobatic pirouettes. You open your mouth and issue a command with the full force of your intent behind it.

“ENOUGH!” You are sure that there is a more efficient way to do this, but you can’t remember, why can’t you remember? You are busy now, and can’t go rooting about after that thought.

The swirling goes to a dead stop and you seize control before it can resume. “One at a time or I can’t help any of you. Youngest at the time of death first. You WILL wait patiently for your turn. Who’s first?”

Windows are clacking shut above you, except for the ones that are clacking open. It’s probably best that some latent human survival sense has made this section of the neighborhood crawl with the sense of best-be-elsewhere. Most of the windows are shut. What few pedestrians you see are at the edges, starting in, then backing out like they forgot something urgent elsewhere. You have felt the flash of a few cameras, but most of the neighborhood is smart enough not to interfere. Most. New Yorkers remind you of the best and worst of Alternia. There are always some up for earning a Charls Darwin.

There is a slow swirl as the ghosts sort themselves and a young female with an infant in her arms moves forward, firms under your focus, colors shading in to blues and reds, dark hair frizzing above her pale face with its dark eyes and scatter of light brown spots. Your companions are still ready, but not so tense. Dave has come forward to stand by you. You nod to him that you have control. You know Terezi can already smell your triumph.

The mother and child died in a shootout, one stray bullet to take them both (You do not understand how bullets and cats and dogs can all “stray”. Are they really so alike to humans?). Terezi has flicked her phone on, is recording. You doubt that the recording will contain the woman’s replies or that her form will be visible, but it will list your questions at least, which will help you all remember.

Except now Dove is already taking down her replies, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of every one, just extracting what you need, what they need to say.

Dave has his phone open and lifts it so you can view it, lined with two names, two dates of birth, one date of death, a location. JARVIS has already isolated who the ghosts are, or rather, were. The shooting was in public, in daytime, the human safety period. There were witnesses but no one would testify, terrified of the shooter’s clade.

A mass of ghosts drift over to Dave to peer of his shoulder. “Back up a bit, guys and ghouls, you’re gonna fog this here bitching screen like smog rolling in off the industrial revolution river with an armada of coal-fired steamboats coming into port. And if we get the blue screen of death, no one gets justice. And that makes Justice very frustrated. Don’t cockblock Justice, just don’t.” The mass drifts back into line.

You sink a bit of your attention into both these ghosts, feel the compass needle of the shooter’s direction through the filter of their loss, the mother’s angry and desolate, the infant just confused, but potent in its own way. You extract a promise from the woman, bind her with a tiny extra cantrap. You understand the need for revenge but you cannot allow this world to burn with it, you must maintain a balance. This world is the end of the line for your family-clade. You will not allow it to be destroyed, even in tiny cumulative wrongs, not so long as you can fix them.

You let the needle snap tight and they fade out to haunt the shooter. Until such a time as the mother decides to go or someone properly blesses the shooter, her murderer will never yet hold a gun that does not rust within hours, a knife that does not slip to taste its wielder. The shooter better get used to sandwiches or confess, because forks are going to be dangerous and spoons pretty iffy. The effect is contagious on a limited basis to anyone who spends a great deal of time with them and carries their own illegal firearm. You bare your teeth in a smile that has nothing to do with “good” humor.

Karkat has been moving away from your group and shooing the ghosts into a line that stretches down the block. You can hear the rise and fall of his voice commanding order, sorting disagreements as he goes, but you can’t pay too much attention as you turn your attention to the next in line. It’s clear at least that he does not need help.

Tavros has his phone out and is trying to get enough visual information for JARVIS to analyze and identify the next in line, an immature human that would be perhaps level with his chair arms if it weren’t already sitting on him. Before the colors fill in under your focus, the child in grays reminds you of so many of the young ghosts of Alternia, skin properly protective and not pasty like Dave and so many of the adults in the tower. Then the colors fill in, skin and eyes close to Tavros’s warm brown irises, clothes and absolutely tiny squeakers a discombobulating royal pink and purple mix. Without scent and social cues, you could guess female due to the color-coding many humans in this region use, but who knows.

She, if that is right, is one of the ghosts that wear their death wounds. Her hair is braided tightly in orderly rows, and tiny gem studs still sparkle in her ears. Under a mask of Karkat-red blood, her face is lost but also sweet. She is reaching for Tavros’s nose ring as he tries to identify her with JARVIS. You absolutely know someone is missing her.

You kneel next to Tavros. Your gift works best if you remain utterly honest and so you embrace your wish that you could have protected her, your desire to help, and you reach out a hand. She reaches back and when your hands connect you know that it was a car crash, that her mother’s still crying for her when she thinks no one can hear, that her older brother feels guilty and has started skipping school, that her father has been working longer hours and avoids coming home. The last ghost wanted justice, and that was easy. This one just wants her family-clade to stop falling apart. You don’t know what you can do. Perhaps JARVIS will know. You promise her you’ll try and disentangle your hands. Tavros has managed to identify the next ghost while you worked. He also seems fine as he is, so you leave her in his lap and turn your focus to your next duty.

The next ghosts are easy by comparison. You are all too familiar with child ghosts. These come in a riot of clothes colors and the flexible but limited spectrum of human skin, hair, and eye tones. They are mostly dead of congenital flaws that lay in wait, disease, blameless accidents. They aren’t in the least interested in revenge. They mostly want to leave messages, and this you can do. One wants to meet Spiderman. You are not sure why this is a human thing, but you figure that a creature, however human-shaped, that swings around the city like a rogue trapezerrist has a steady head, so you imbue the small ghost with just enough that she can find him and bestow the “hugest, hugest bear hug”. You remind her that she needs to wait until he’s on a roof, not swinging, and not in the middle of a fight. She gives you a gap-toothed grin, braids swinging. Then they all want to do the same thing. You extract promises and imbue no less than seven more child ghosts and two teenagers. You need to send this Spiderman a flower arrangement, the traditional human conveyance of greatest apologies, because as weird as his life is, his night’s about to get weirder, at least by human standards.

You know that when they complete their quest, they will disperse. You don’t know what happens to human ghosts in this universe when they disperse. Is it like going to sleep? Like a drop of blood in a puddle of water, just fading out as it combines to become part of a greater whole? Do they enter a new level of some cosmic game? Is there nothingness, or dust, or fiery pits and angel choirs? You don’t know what will happen when you die, not anymore. But you are fiercely happy to be alive and you have work to do.

You have hit a patch of betweeners, teenagers who think that they are adults. They have refused to order by exact age and the line has bunched and clumped. Two are clearly, visibly, human mutants, one with fairly respectable horns, by troll standards. That one tosses you what you know to be an American human salute, in a manner similar to Dave when he favors laconic irony. You nod back and survey this section of the line. There are suicides, and homicides, and accidental overdoses, unrecoverable bad decisions, and self-hatred that has become its own parasitic manifestation. And there are all the other ways to die as well.

You don’t know any of them, but you can recognize every face. Their familiarity is a weight. So much of the intricate practice of your gift is based on being open, empathetic. You take confessions and more messages and are grateful to have help, the weight of your listening its own contractual promises. You will not go under. But this way the weight is shared.

There’s a boy on crutches, a girl with no hair, and they are, for the lack of a better explanation, the most healthy, the least messed up. The boy leaves separate messages for each of his five family-clade members, two parents and three younger siblings. The crutches fade and he walks away. Then he fades too.

The girl grasps your hand and leaves a message for her docterrerist. “I said some terrible things. I was afraid and in a lot of pain. I didn’t really mean them and it wasn’t fair.” She dictates a bit more. You ask her if she wants to say anything else, to anyone else. “I already said goodbye to my mother and sister. They have each other and need to heal. I don’t want to disturb that.” You promise to deliver her message and she squeezes your hand. Her hair grows back in. She smiles and her eyes sparkle. She fades out.

Terezi is considering the line, licking her cane with the care of a sword master sharpening their blade. When one of the ghosts, spectrally young and swaggering, tries to loom over Tavros and his charge, she swats it. It yelps and turns on her. She swats it again. You exert a bit of attention to push at it and it settles, captive to her assertion. “We are here to assist, young Mr. Drunken Drowning. If you require more time to… chill… you are welcome to go to the end of the line.” You know this is accompanied by a point and swing of her threatening cane, just as you know the ghost will behave now. Terezi has it under control. It believes it cannot challenge her further, and so it can’t. You deal with it, and with another.

You take messages from adults now, soldiers in uniforms disparate enough that even you know they are from different eras as much as branches, and woman and men who died of cancers and heart attacks and more accidents and diseases and passions gone wrong, now gone cold. Some of them disperse, some go elsewhere. You draw out secrets and regrets and Dove takes them all. JARVIS will be a repository of all this sorrow, just as you six are.

There is a drifter in gray and brown clothes, and whenever he stops moving (you think he’s a he) he looks like a pile of forgotten rags. He leaves a message with you for a daughter he left and makes a request. Tony has plenty of liquor. You acquiesce. He does not fade out but goes elsewhere to wait.

There’s a few older humans now, but not many. Mostly messages. The last one wants revenge on her daughter for selling her hive furnishings. “Sixty-three years in tailored vinyl slipcovers. Sixty-three years! And she dumped it all because her no good husband doesn’t like chartreuse and flowers. What husband has any right to tell her how to decorate? I never let my husband tell ME how to decorate! Can you believe it? She said she was downsizing, was too old to need such large furniture. Old? Then what does that make me?” You stop listening at that point. You are sure that whoever and wherever her daughter is, she is old enough to finally deserve some quiet. The ghost doesn’t notice as you gently unwind her, still complaining until she finally disperses. There are definitely disadvantages to being raised by your ancestor.

The seven of you take long way back to the tower, JARVIS supplying directions in an easier format than the ghost child, now with a thumb tucked in her cheek. Dove is pushing Tavros so that he doesn’t knock into her as he pushes the chair. He has a motorized one, but he likes to maintain muscle tone and the motorized chair is heavy for perambulations that might involve muscling it past or over obstacles. You stop outside the building where the ghost’s family-clade dwells. A light turns off in a window above you and the child vanishes. You know that she hasn’t dispersed, just as you know that she’s not solid enough to be seen or touched in the apartment above. Whatever you need to do to help her, it’s unfinished, but she seems content to trust you. You don’t want to break that trust.

This is how you first hold court among the human dead.

*

Back at the tower, suddenly ravenous, the six of you crack open a set of human good fortune cookies and they are all blank. The food is a shade paler than it ought to be. Your companions look a bit discombobulated to know that there were ghosts running their ectoplasm through your leftovers, but thinking of the first ghost of tonight, you figure it was a nice treat for them. You try a pork bun. Still edible, but not as tasty as it had previously smelled. You are ravenous with the exercise of you gift and eat it anyway. You all agree without a word to shelve the rest of the food, with a warning regarding origin for anyone with allergies (John) or particular restrictions (Equius). No one laughs aloud when a moment later Vriska triumphantly hogs it all then informs you that it is booooooooring and tasteless. She swans back out with it anyways.

The six of you hold your laughter in for an eight-count plus some after she leaves and you are all shaken with paroxysms of laughter, except for Karkat who is still frowning at her exit as the hysteria dies down. “Does no one else find that to be a bit too Deus Ex Machina?”

“Ah, I may have mentioned to Ms. Serket that you had recently obtained a great surfeit of food from a new restaurant.”

Dave is propping himself up against the refrigerator, and straightens. “J-Pop-Bro, that there is the definition of poetic justice. Bless you and all your bits. And if you ever go evil, please give us a head start to run.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Strider, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. And I would thank you if you were never to call me that again.”

Dove elbows his brother-self. “You didn’t just walk into that wall. You built it yourself and got a running start to make the collision more dramatic. Now are you going to move over and let us raid the fridge before ‘Radia has to eat you to restore her blood sugar?”

Terezi applies her own elbow and Dave folds over again with a wheeze like a deflating squeezebox. She steps on him like handy stepstool apparatus and digs through the well-stocked freezer to emerge with a pint of “Death by Chocolate” ice cream, licks the picture once and cackles a bit about po3t1c just1c3. Dove grabs spoons and you circle the pint until it’s gone. Dave recovers in time to dig out a pint of Chubby Hubby and offers it to Karkat with a pointed comment. Karkat retaliates with a pint of Chunky Monkey. The two of them really need to figure out if they’re flirting or competing for John’s attention, or both. You take your time when it’s your turn to pick a flavor.

Personally, you prefer Karamel Sutra and are also in favor of less quadrants and more attempts to treat each other in a manner akin to how one would like to be treated, regardless of how it gets labeled.

You pause over the “Coffee, Coffee, BuzzBuzzBuzz”, but that is probably a bad idea at 12:42:56am. You push it to the back with a brief moment of gratitude to the universe that your moirail is unlikely to find it behind the frozen legumes. You pull out the Karamel, dig you spoon into the center. No one touches the AmeriCone Dream, currently sporting bulging jiggly plastic eyes at the front of the freezer, understood by all to be part of Tony’s ongoing attempt to court Steve and/or antagonize Phil. Pepper is very clearly a permissive master.

If your “legal guardian” and the other adults of the tower are representative of the survivors of human puberty, there’s a high chance that all your human companions will be crazy when they emerge from their final growth spurt. This is unlikely to be much of a change. The Chocolate Therapy has a ring of pipe-cleaner tentacles. One of the tentacles has a tiny sign, “Come to the dark side. We have cookies.”

The six of you finish all four pints. Tavros and Dove, stuffed with icy dessert, finally stop shivering and shake their heads when Dave asks them if they want, “a chance to make a shitty BJ flavor joke”.

*

Your name is Joseph Liu and you have had a visitation. You have always considered yourself fairly normal. Boring even. There are at least three dozen Joseph Lius in the city and you are fairly certain that you are the most uninteresting. It has been an almost comforting thought, but you don’t think you can maintain it.

There are hours left on your shift and you don’t know how you are going to concentrate with your (dead) mother looking over your shoulder. You know that you have sometimes been a disappointment to her. Good grades. No ambition. But if your most recent customers are right, she just wants you to be happy. You don’t know if that makes it worse or better. You miss your mother. You hope Nina says yes.

*

Your name is Peter Parker. In your work uniform, you respond to Spiderman, and a variety of less savory appellations, depending on who’s objecting to what. You can’t repeat what the window washers regularly call you. Aunt May would know. Somehow.

You don’t know what just happened. But as ridiculous as it sounds, if you had to guess…

You think you’ve just been haunted.

It was…surprisingly friendly.

*

You are the incomparable Tony Stark. It is 3am in the morning and you are going to bed early because you are Tony Stark and you can’t be tamed. Also, possibly, you are pretty sure you can fall asleep this time. JARVIS confirms everyone is accounted for. You check in on PesterSnapYourTrap for your bedtime nightcap of madcap teenage shenanigans.

There’s some photos of the city, TG currently obsessed with graffiti and DS with typography, specifically old signs, peeling, rusting, and otherwise degrading. Plenty of photos of each other in their worse moments. You still can’t tell them apart until one of them talks.

There is a public service announcement from Ferdinand, “pLEASE dO nOT fEED tHE aNIMALS”, followed by a series of shots that would be straight out of _The Birds_ , except that they’re pretty humorous. Duck, duck, pigeon attack.

There’s one shot of a glossy red brown roast bird, other plates at the edges of the shot. It’s listed as @CA H4v3 c4ptur3d 4nd 1nt3rrog4t3d your n3m3s1s. Full conf3ss1on. D3l1c1ous.

The last shot is a gif, slow and hazy, twelve images that cycle, each featuring goth gal. The first four feature a hazy mass about half her height, one where it touches the ground and several that seem to convey jumping, and, from her indulgent body language in reaction, excitement. The next set of images is Aradia with a hazy form mirroring her, or her mirroring it. In two shots she stands at attention, the flicker of the mist or haze or whatever it is the only thing to show that it is not the same shot run twice as long. In the next two she appears to be saluting. It is oddly solemn for her usually cheerful face, oddly formal for her curvaceous form in its flowing flower-child skirt. The last set of images are even stranger. Again she is captured in the frame with a hazy form, this one just under her height. One of her hands is pinching the bridge of her nose (Are horn aches a thing? Must pester Shouty.). Her other hand gestures a sort of “get-on-with-it” and is unwinding the shrinking cloud.

The caption is from DS: That is how a Megido Do.

If you were firing on all cylinders, heck if you had a full cylinder left to fire on, you might be panicked enough to interrogate JARVIS on what appears to be Ghostbuster shenanigans. As it is, you frown a bit and ask “Is there something I should know about this?” He shows you YouTube videos about mollusks in response and you fall asleep without noticing that it’s a distraction. You don’t notice when the lights dim and your tablet goes dark.

Tomorrow morning, when the dawn hits the tower, you will still be asleep when some of the kids raid your (locked, you are _trying_ to be responsible) liquor cabinet and dump a bottle of very fine brandy down the side of the tower. They will lock the cabinet afterwards and you won’t miss the brandy for a few weeks. You’ve been drinking a lot less lately.

It will be a few months before your realize that you don’t just have an infestation of pigeons, they’re _living_ on your roof. The kids are _feeding_ them. Less-of-an-ass-Dave has flower-child _communing_ sessions with them. You will be terrified that you will smack one in the suit and have to explain to Ferdinand or someone that you ran over one of their pets.

But tonight? Tonight you sleep well.

*

Your name is Linnie Liu and when you hear the whole story from Nina two days later, first you squee (you love Nina and now you’re going to be The. Best. Cousin-in-laws. Ever.) and then you not only post the best of your photos (Jeeze, does the nubby one ever smile?) on the restaurant’s Facebook page, you also upload a silhouette shot of the gracious ram-horned girl to your Tumblr account. It is among the first of what will soon be a NYC photo hunt akin to Avengers-spotting. You tag it #NYCSmallMediumAtLarge.

She’s supposed to be back this week. You are going to hug her SO hard.

And when Nina and Joe have nerdy-nerdy babies, you are going to be The. Best. Auntie! (Shut up. Joe and you are both sans-siblings, it totally counts!) You have been waiting for them to get it together for NINE YEARS. You have already knitted three baby blankets waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh, oooh, ooh! Time for rambling… There is fanart! I was idly wondering if there was in fact a NYC psychic and if they used the #NYCSmallMediumAtLarge tag. Alas, no. But. Something better! Lovely art! (Look at all these here exclamation marks. I mean each and every one. !.) Go, fill your ganderbulbs with lovely and your pumpbiscuit with sweet on Kaenith’s tumblr(s):
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> <http://kaenith.tumblr.com/post/112441351308/lately-ive-been-reading-tony-stark-is-not-willie>
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	8. En Plein Air

You are Steve Rodgers, also known as Captain America, whatever your sometimes complicated feelings on the matter. Today you are mostly just Steve because there is, at the moment, no emergency needing your work persona, though you still carry your shield in its case, just in case. When you carry your easel and canvas case, it all blends into the background easily. It makes you suspicious of other painters. You wish your world was not so complicated that such is necessary.

Today is overcast but not forecasted to rain, a practical use of computers of which you can approve without mixed feelings. It’s good lighting for painting and you are walking to Central Park with Eridan.

You are fond of him and quite certain that, ultimately, he will grow up to be a good person.

Everyone has a struggle to grow and to discover what is important enough to lay down their life, or, even harder, to live for. He has made a lot of mistakes, but he has also admitted many of them, though you don’t pretend to think that he has told you or Darcy all of them. He honestly wants to make you proud. You already are.

You remember how desperate you were to fight for your country. You remember the desperation in everyone, on all sides, in that long strange vivid stretch of the war. You can’t blame him for upholding a regime that was all he knew, for initially being an instrument of the greater horror of a clockwork he couldn’t halt. It is likely to be a lovely day and you will not ruin it by thinking about Alternia.

 _(The Empress wwas desire an death an life, howw coulda wwe do other but obey? The Carbuncle wwas tha Emissary a tha Horrorterrors and obedient tah the imperial blood. Mostly. There wwas no killin’ it, and nah feedin’ it just wwoulda made it start killin’. And Fef lovves her Mom._ His face had been solemn and he had run his hands down his pant legs like he wished he had something else to nervously tend to.)

You think sometimes of all the German citizens, all the citizens elsewhere, that did nothing, even as others did, and some did and did not get caught. You can all too easily imagine his fierce and earnest face above a uniform. It is your fierce and earnest belief that it will never be that of the enemy. You will not allow it.

You know he regrets a great deal. You want him to know that he can be something and someone else here, that the statute of limitations has to be reset if almost everyone dies, but everyone lives again.

You don’t pretend to understand that part, but there are plenty of things you don’t understand since you woke up. You divide these into “technology to be assimilated”, “culture and world events to be assimilated (people are the same)”, and “Tony is yanking your chain, try to ignore him”.

You believe in the Creator. However they got here, they are people. Children still, but not for long.

You pick a spot in the park and let Eridan set up his easel for the view he wants, then set yours up back to back with him. This way you can still talk easily, but you can also keep an eye over each other’s shoulders for approaching trouble. It makes you both more comfortable. Having the canvas to hide behind also makes it easier for him to ask you questions.

You open your sealed palette and he bends down to prepare his. You’re both back to working in water-soluble oils now, though last week he seemed pretty enthused about pastels.

“Any particular reason you’re not using the chalks?”

“Terezi.” This is said with a sigh, but no anger.

“Hmm?” Sometimes he needs to rant, and sometimes you have to draw him out.

“Coupla them wwent missin’, then a coupla more. Then tha criminal returned to tha scene a tha crime and finished ‘em all off like a box a fancy chocolates. Said she liked tha crunch.”

“Is she all right?”

“Wwhy wwouldn’ta she be?”

“Some of them are toxic, it’s on the packaging.”

“She’s nah stupid. Doubt there’s a poison made or growwn she can’ta sniff out aheada time. She’ll be fine. I just wwon’t wwork in pastels.”

“That’s a mature decision.”

“I’ma tryin’.”


	9. Karkat’s Most Unfortunate Adventure to the ER

Spiders. What is this City’s obsession with spiders? You already live with “Black Widow” and Vriska. Why does the city need a “Doc Ock”, a “Spiderman”, and, save you from bored mechanarchististas “Dr. Doom’s stupid fleet of stupid-cupid spider-drones”. Answer: it doesn’t. How about just a nice passive-aggressive note to his would-be-kismesis?

‘Hey you, your face makes me want to hide mine.’ ‘Hey you, insert-lusus-joke here.’ Would that be too much to ask? All that fervent fermenting of brainmatter and they can’t share at least enough of one spastic monkey language to write and read a letter, a postcard, an email, a fleabitten tweet. You would paint the billboard yourself if it meant they’d stop escalating their private spats to involve the rest of the city.

Jerks. Twits. Jackassholes. You’re saving your breath so you can’t even express anything more creative to explicate your situation because there are two spiderbots, one nearby entrance to the subway, one squishy stupid Karkat Vantas, and a supply of metal chairs from an unfortunate café that doesn’t currently need them anyway. You suspect that if they notice your little game of keep-away they may try to charge you for them. Good luck extracting caegars from your cold dead stupid ass.

The spiderbots are too big to get into the subway, probably won’t be able to collapse the entrance, and are emphatically between you and possible escape. Why are you stuck out in the open when everyone else is cowering in a nice cave-like shelter with the rest of the squishy crowd?

Because you are a dumbass with a soft bloodpusher and a rotted pan and some of them can’t run quite as fast as you can, especially the old ones, and the one pushing a grub in a wheeled contraption, and the wrigglers on a deity-be-damned fieldtrip.

One of the stupidbots is headed for the subway entrance. You don’t think it can make it in, but you will spontaneously combust, taking them both out with the sheer fire of your rage and fatal-inexactitude, if you are wrong.

“Hey dingflapbeast, are you really a mechanical arachnid, or did your lusus step on a squiddly and a Volkswagen-Beetle conveyance, vomit, call it a night, and fall over overly inebriated?” It’s not your best. They’re not very bright but they apparently understand insults. Why does ‘Doom’ program his bots to get angry? It’s just so… inefficient. Like, is there no one else on the playground to monologue at?

They refocus on you. You are going to die. You heft a chair. You are going to take out at least one stupidbot with you and you will scratch out an insulting message to be your fitting epitaph. “Doom thuckth”. You will have to scratch it with you short-taloned grasping appendages, or possibly your stubby stubborn masticating dentition, it will have to be brief.

Shitdamn, one of them just batted you hard enough that you skid backwards and skin your hands. Uglyass human-red wells up. You scramble to your feet and run again, flex your digits and wish you had your sickles. And suddenly, somehow you do.

Fuglyass red, but sharp enough that on your next dodge you wing the bot back, and are now chased by two spiderbots with a total of 15 legs between them. Okay. This is a bit more feasible. Something in you that is not the part chanting, ‘Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!’ is fiercely exultant. You really want to do some damage.

You’ve lost track of time, but you had hit the panic button on your phone as soon as they showed up and you know JARVIS can hear you. You just have to make sure that you last until back-up gets here and don’t expire with a nice little “shit” to leave ringing in your companions’ ears as their last contact from you. Who are you kidding? It would exactly fit.

You get another leg on the maimed bot, then a two-fer on the no-longer-pristine one. Wax-on, wax-off. You might actually survive this, if you can stop thinking about terrible human rite-of-passage movies. Your last thoughts will have been wasted on John and his inexplicably, inarticulably odious obsession.

You whittle away a bit more until you’re down to two spiders, eight legs total. They’ve still got all their back legs, can still charge like rampaging hoofbeasts, but they’re not so good with the turning, and pretty bad with the braking. You can work with this.

You wish one of the long range specialists was here with a decent rifle or bow or whatever, because this is tedious, and if another shows up, it all goes down the loadgaper. You will be the comingled clump of bio-hazardous waste and the tree expressly grown to be chopped down, shredded into a slurry, and pressed out to grace the end stage of digestion at its finest moment. It will be you.

You finally managed to set them up to run full tilt at you, manage a straight up jump from between them powered on sheer don’t-want-to-die and a curmudgeonly certainty that the universe will still screw you over, even if you gave in, rolled over, and died already.

They crash head on and settle in a pile of sparking double-ended spiderbot butt. You skitter down the back of one, hit the hard ground rolling and force yourself up, panting and watching them to be sure they don’t get up. You can’t believe you’re not dead.

And that’s when a New York City driver, the epitome of fatty lipids swimming franticly to the top of a container of moobeast squeezings, swerves and hits you with their car.

Clearly, the mothergrub expressly fluttered her wide, wizened sphincter for the purpose of gracing the multiverse with this credit to well-balanced, clear-sighted assholes everywhere. Typical. Do they not see the freaking mass of spiderparts? Oh wait, they didn’t want to total their car, so they went for a nice red-wash instead.

You look down at the pavement, your sickles are fading out and trickling to join the puddle of blood under you. One of your legs is bent in the wrong place. Your skinned hands hurt again. You landed in the trickster-be-damned stripebeast-painted designated pedestrian migration route. There are no words. You refuse to use ironic.

*

Your name is Melanie Ostrowski and you are a NYC EMT with a love-hate relationship with your job. There is absolutely nothing you’d rather do. You’re a bit of an adrenalin junkie. Some people get their high flirting with things that might send them to their Maker. You get yours preventing people from making the trip prematurely. The hate part is that you can never quite disengage.

Like the old saw that you can take the kid off the farm but can’t take the farm out of the kid, you are never entirely off the job. Today, a weekday you had off, you were running errands when the latest menace hit the streets. You were leaving the subway when everyone came crowding back in, with the unmistakable sound of heavy machinery rampaging flooding in as people quieted down. There’s the sound of a shouted taunt, not panicked, and the robots tramp around but don’t yet loom over the entrance. It sounds like one of the supers has arrived, good.

You’ve checked on a hyperventilating teenager, foisted them off on their friend to attend to them, and you’re keeping an eye out for any other stress-induced issues. An off-duty cop is phoning in the location and problem. The crowd is relatively quiet. Attacks are the one time that there’s a waiver of the don’t-make-eye-contact rule. As soon as everyone clears out, you will once again be complete strangers. There’s an elderly man with a cane. Two people got up off of a bench to give him room. He’s sitting with an air of tangible calm, waiting, like everyone else. Either he’s ready for the Next Great Adventure, or he’s seen worse.

You all hear a great crash and thump, about the size of two large rampaging machines. There’s a moment of silence and a few people head up the stairs, when a very distinct sound occurs that makes your breath catch. Screech-thump.

You are already racing for the exit. That was the sound of a pedestrian meeting a car bumper, a driver not braking in time. You are not the only one who races out. Despite the “megafauna” attacks, cars are still the top NYC pedestrian predator.

The mass of sparking robot is down for the count. You’ve snagged a level-headed woman to call an ambulance for the pedestrian and she’s following you without argument. The cop has his badge out and is headed for the driver. Whoever the super was, they didn’t stick around. Maybe they had other things to deal with.

The kid in the crosswalk is clearly your first priority. You’ve already pulled out a pair of gloves. Your kids laugh, but you always want to be prepared.

Probably five feet even, complex broken leg, bleeding exuberantly according to the puddle. Sitting up, the masochist. The kid’s breathing is surprisingly steady, only slightly in shock. So far. He’s cursing. He’s also very clearly a mutant. That’s not the problem. You leave politics outside your job, even if there are some politicians you wouldn’t mind leaving behind on your job. You’re a professional. You’d never do it.

You’re already introducing yourself, assessing him, cutting the pant leg to assess the source of bleeding. (Swiss army knife. The TSA, and offices with security, hate people like you who interrupt their days with conflicting ideas of what prepared-to-leave-the-house means, but you never leave home without one. This is why.)

The problem isn’t that the kid’s a mutant. It’s that mutants are the very definition of outlier on the human spectrum, and you have lost passengers, but you’ve never killed one. You don’t want to start now, and you don’t know how he’ll react to even type O negative, not when his blood is the right color but slightly too opaque. It’s a moot point at the moment, but the ambulance should be here in minutes and the more the shock affects him, the less information you’ll be able to get.

You get to the wound and it’s nasty but not actually spurting like he tore an artery, you wrap it with the inside of the cut off pant leg, wrap it tighter with your outer shirt. You urge him to lie down and elevate it but while he isn’t outright combative he makes clear you won’t get him supine without tranquilizers. You’re not actually sure where all the blood came from, at least not with how it puddled.

“Hey, kid, are you bleeding anywhere besides your leg?” He shakes his head, pauses, lifts a hand to show raw skin. Responsive, but noticeably slowed.

“Do you know what blood type you are?”

“Red, genius, do you know you’re a mammal?” Great. Everyone’s a comedian. At least he’s still with it.

“Kid, if you need a transfusion, do you know what blood type is compatible with you?”

“None. Special snowflake. That’s me. Kind of cold. Fitting.” This is a bit slower, and that’s worrying. Your drafted help, Linda, pulls her light jacket off and wraps it over his shoulders. He mutters something in the singsong voice of children everywhere channeling their parents, “When you get your fool-ass culled, don’t come running to me.” He waves one hand, then the other. He giggles a bit and there’s a tinge of hysteria to it. At least he probably doesn’t have a spinal injury.

“Are you going to vivisect me now?”

Oh. My. God.

Maybe you _would_ leave some of those politicians behind. Oops. Unforeseen technical difficulties. No heart to defibrillate.

“Kid, we’re stopping the bleeding so that we can get you to the hospital where they have more equipment to help with your leg. But you’ve lost some blood and may lose some more. If they need to top you off, is there anything they can use?”

He looks at you like you’re speaking Klingon. Linda, still steady, asks, “Do you have a phone? Do you have an emergency contact? Would they know your medical details?”

He pats his pants pocket and extracts a top-of-the-line Starkphone, miraculously whole, hits a few buttons. A voice asks if he needs assistance and he tells them that “Yeah, I think I really do. Like, Equius-type assistance, I’m bleeding like an oinkbeast on a rotating spit. Marinating in stupidity. Except I’m ass-flat on the street with a broken leg. And a metric shit-ton of spectators. Stick a barbecue fork in me and leave me for the rainbowdrinkers, I’m done.” He can’t quite coordinate holding the phone up and he sets it down on the pavement with the concentration of someone for whom the act is more difficult than expected. Most people only see this in drunks. Unfortunately, it’s not an uncommon phenomenon to you.

Behind you, a stream of New Yorkers are passing the sparking mess of a robot-explosion as they exit the subway. There’s some phones clicking at the wreck, but no one tries to get in the kid’s face, at least not after Linda turns on the first one with a snarl worthy of a mama bear. There’s not much else you can do until help arrives, besides keep him calm, keep him company. He’ll need more equipment to see if there’s more internal damage. He still won’t let you lie him down to elevate the leg.

“Saline.” You don’t realize at first that he’s actually responding to your question.

“Saltwater for blood, heh. But, I don’t think I can die of blood loss.” He raises a hand in front of his face with the utmost concentration. A furrow digs itself into his forehead. The puddle of blood on the asphalt flows together and up into the air before his hand. Creepy, but very useful for cleanup. You wonder if this is particular to his own blood or if he does house calls to hoity-toity dry-cleaning services.

The hand and ball of squirmy blood head for his leg. You reach out a hand for his arm.

“Wait!”

The ball quivers in the air but he looks at you, “What?!”

“Are you putting your blood back?”

“Yes.” It’s said with the determination of the very tired attempting to not sound drunk.

“Is it clean?

“What?”

“Are you able to clean what you’re putting back, or are you about to dump street dirt into your veins?”

“Point.” He relents, “a veritable hit. Shit. Nook-deep in shitty eight-limbed robo-spiders and taint-deep in blind-as-a-cavern-fungus mechanical conveyance operators.” He giggles a bit. He’s a tough cookie with a dirty mouth, and this is not a sign of progress, but this much pain will dump endorphins in until, as your niece put it after one memorable short trip out of the treehouse window, ‘I’m swimming with the en-dolphins’. That week’s vocabulary word was defenestrated. And co-pay.

“Can you prevent yourself from bleeding further, block off any added contagions getting in? Without blocking off circulation?”

“Yeah, that, that sounds. Better. Fuck. Fuck a cluck-in-a-bucket. I am the scum on a street puddle aspiring to evolve to a slimemold.” He pokes at his break, hisses, and finally lies down. The ambulance is finally here. You recognize the guys on duty. They transfer him to the stretcher and get him in the vehicle. You snag his phone and follow. They let you. You wave to Linda in thanks and she melts back into the crowd, sans one jacket.

A voice emerges from his phone as they get an oxygen mask on him. “Hello?”

You answer. The kid’s not quite with it enough to say yea or nay. You relay your destination and hope it’s the right thing to do. You relay information to the guys on duty: oxygen and saline only, no plasma, no platelets, no meds, an expert, one “Equius Zahhak”, will meet the ambulance at the hospital. Stark Industries will cover all his expenses, but he will likely need to be transported elsewhere. The trip passes quickly.

You didn’t expect to actually recognize the “expert” but it’s pretty obvious that they’re related. The expert is trailed by two suits with badges. You feel a bit protective over your temporary charge, sincerely hope that this isn’t the prelude to the vivisection he seemed sure lay in wait, somewhere. Yeah, not too fond of the suits.

The kid rouses just enough to get a look at the greeting committee, relaxes, and tells “Zahhak” that “If I wake up with any more robot parts than I started with, I’m going to plant them so far up your taintchute, your descendants will be setting themselves on fire every time they fart.”

This makes “Zahhak” both wince and relax. You really don’t have any right to stay. You surrender the phone to him and leave. It’s been an eventful morning. You still have errands to run. First stop, home to change. Your kids will never forgive you if they run out of Pop-tarts. You are so glad that they are safe in school.

*

You are Aleksei Dmitriev and in your homeland you were a lawyer. Here, your licensing is currently, and may well continue to be, making the slowly digesting bureaucratic journey towards establishing your credentials, even as you study exhaustively in your free time. In the meanwhile, you are working with a cleanup crew for accident sites and crime scenes. It is unfortunately steady work and you have seen things that you wish you had not, but someone has to do it. You remain optimistic that you have done what you can for your family. Both your daughters are beginning medical school now. They may well be licensed to practice before you are.

You are a crime scene cleaner and you are here to scrub blood from asphalt. There are separate crews for the massive robotic carcasses and the damaged cars and broken glass.

You get out your solvent and give the scene a quick assessment. It is your fourth stop of the day. If you hadn’t been told that it was blood, you’d call it graffiti. Over the painted bars of the crosswalk is a bright red symbol made of two diagonally-mirrored shapes, curved like crescent moons with handles, like sickles in want of a hammer and a bit of propaganda. The edges are sharply defined, the color is fresh blood red. The liquid is utterly dry. You are clearly imagining things.

You spray and scrub until the pavement runs clean. You finish your work and move to your next stop. You won’t notice that the symbol returns when the water dries. The symbol will return even when the crosswalk is repainted. Several times. It will prove to be rather stubborn. Anyone who knew its source would be unsurprised.


	10. Keep Calm and Pepper On

JARVIS calls you, and you get back within hours. You substitute, postpone, or cancel three days of meetings and send your sincere but firm regrets on the plane ride back to the few people who will take it is a deliberate insult if you don’t personally cancel.

You leave two of your assistants to take care of most of the meetings as best they can, and your home office staff will hold the fort for the rest. None of the business deals will get finalized without you, but they can move along while you work remotely. Despite the age of the internet, despite all of Tony’s innovation, nothing substitutes for a face-to-face facedown at a meeting. Your knowledge, your comportment, your suits, your subtle makeup, these are your own armor and war paint, and you have more to protect than ever.

You let slip to your assistants that someone at home got hurt, and Irene Brown, the most formidable and efficient paralegal you know, actually pats you on the shoulder and tells you to take what time you need, that “At the root of it, we all work to keep our families fed, but the work usually tries to do the eating right back. Go home. The company will be here when you get back. We’ll take care of things.”

She had actually _smiled_ at you as you left, and you don’t think it was just because she’d be next up to bat at intimidating the truth out of your supplier in Lamar, CO at the next of many meetings this week.

Irene, sharp as a tack, now gray hair always keep short and natural, predates you at Stark International, then Stark Industries, and office rumor says she’s never once cracked a smile outside of admonishing a long-ago embezzler until they cried, confessed, and quit. She mentored you when you first joined the administrative pool, and you certainly never witnessed such an expression then.

She works through her lunch breaks, takes a meticulous two weeks off every six months, has two children in their forties and three grandchildren, and that is the extent of your knowledge of her life outside SI. You’ve never wondered further. Her demeanor has never invited such suppositions. Perhaps she is equally calm and reserved with her children and grandchildren. Perhaps she bakes cookies or knits scarves for them. Perhaps she vacations in some tropical paradise surfing only to return to SI and her precisely tailored suits and sensible heels.

You don’t know when it was that you first realized that it was unlikely that you would ever have children of your own. It wasn’t an epiphany, but a long, slow buildup of never-the-right-time, never-enough-time, clawing your way to respect in a corporate world that still inspects and critiques before it analyses, chasing after Tony and watching his back as best as you can, until Tony was family, somewhere between partner and charge, maddeningly brilliant and frustrating, utterly exhausting, and utterly beloved.

You know that you wouldn’t be a good mother, that any child of yours would grow in the care of a nanny, seeing you often enough, comparing you often enough, to know that in the division of your time, they never came first, not often enough, and you consolation has been that the kindest thing to do was not to subject a child to such a conflict.

When Tony was kidnapped, when Tony was tortured, when Tony returned, irreparably changed, you had been grateful that your heart held this soft spot, this blatant target, and no more. When he had been dying, when he miraculously saved himself, you had done your job, and worried, and prayed, and pretended, as best you could, that there was no weakness to be exploited. When he had found new purpose with the Avengers, you had been grateful for him to have something that could keep his focus, a rare thing in the face of his brilliant and restless mind.

You truly like Bruce, and Natasha, and Clint, and Steve, and Thor. Phil Coulson makes you laugh. But they are all adults, and competent at what they do, even as they race into the face of danger. So you might worry, but not as you do for Tony, who is, so often, his own worst enemy.

But somehow, in assisting Tony and JARVIS with the paperwork to slip 18 teenagers and an adult into the American bureaucracy, you had also opened your heart to further damage, and in the race back to the tower, there is a pit of worry thrashing under your calm façade. You don’t think that you could go through this again, even as you know that if you must, you must.

On the plane ride, JARVIS updates you. Karkat will be fine. Equius has reported that he’s stable and should recover fully. Everyone’s understandably upset, but nothing’s overtly volatile. The exception, of course, is Tony. Tony is always the exception.

Happy is at the airport to pick you up, and he drives you back as he always has, professional, kind, humorous. He does his best to banter with you and keep your mind off the circumstances. You can tell he’s worried too, but only because of how well you know him.

When you get back to the tower, Tony’s pacing in his favorite lab, hair sprouting little tufts that attest to wringing his hands through it. JARVIS relays that he’s been like this since the accident. You slip in and Tony turns to you and the words, his pain, just start to flow out, like everything that has been circling internally is breaking free.

“They were supposed to be safe! _I was supposed to keep them safe!_ They’re minors! We’re adults! We’re The _Avengers_! It’s our job! They’re not supposed to have to deal with things like the horror show they left behind, they’re still working through all the baggage the first round left. Pep, it’s not fair.” His voice trails off at this, and you know that he knows that “not fair” has never meant anything to the callous universe. “Not fair” is a child’s argument, a violation of a cherished ideal that was never so universal as it was advertised. Chivalry is not dead, but it has always been endangered.

“I know,” you tell his back as he paces away again. “It hurts when you can’t protect someone. When you know that they are or were in danger, and you were safe and couldn’t help.”

He turns back to you and his face falls in a familiar grimace of apology.

“Aw, Pep. I’m sorry. I’m a miserable failure of an adult and a human being, person, thing, and I never wanted to make your life more difficult.” His hands go up into his hair again and his back bows as he tries to curl up around an intangible hurt.

“I didn’t say it to make you feel worse, Tony. I understand. I never would have wished that you feel the same way. Loving someone can mean that you’d rather bear it alone. Loving someone can also mean that you don’t have to.”

He slides in, edging closer as he paces, and you want to reach out and hug him, but you know that if you initiate it before he’s ready, he’ll try to stay still, fail, pace again, then be too ashamed of squirming free to admit he needs body contact. You wrote the book on Tony Stark, but it’s a private volume for only very, very limited distribution, small tidbits dealt out sparingly to a few trusted individuals.

“You’re the best monorail-cat, Pep.” He ducks his head and flutters his lashes as he looks up. It’s a grin that he’s used on hundreds, been seen by tens of millions, but it doesn’t mean it’s insincere. He has such expressive eyes.

“I’m the best at a lot, Tony.” You lift your chin and flash him your boardroom triumph smile. It’s a challenge. _Come on Tony, when have you ever backed down from a challenge?_

“This doesn’t mean I’m friend-zoned, right? We can still be pail-pals with rails.” _Gottcha_.

“ _Moirails_ , Tony. And labels can make things more complicated. We want to be there for each other. We have the same people and goals and company in common. Everything else, we can get through. We care for one another and that will never change.”

“Aw, Pep, but what about butt-touching? Is that a no now? Is it workplace harassment?”

“Technically, Tony, in some ways, with the restructuring, I’m your boss now.”

“Hell, yes! Promise to bend me over my secretarial desk? I’ll wear my best sexy librarian glasses and skirt.”

“Shh. No talking in the library, young man.”

“Hell, yeah.”

You swat him for talking and he leans into you and just sighs. You wrap your arms around him. It’s not like everything’s been solved, but you have a pretty good idea of what Tony finds therapeutic. You’ve cleared your calendar. You might as well take your time tonight.

Tomorrow you’ll need to consult further with JARVIS and Phil. Today’s near disaster has been a terrifying reminder that you still don’t have safe pharmaceuticals for the trolls, that their very bodies are alien even as they do a very good impression of dangerously intelligent teenagers with PTSD and culture shock. They’ve been adjusting so quickly it becomes all too easy to forget how fragile your house of cards is.

Tonight is for Tony though. His armor protects him from so many physical impacts and threats. This is the armor you can give him, support when he needs it, your vigilant shepherding of the company to best protect him and what you both hold dear, holding a fierce and flawless front against the world so that no one can look at you, at Stark International, and think it an easy target.


	11. Karkat: Trip the light fantastic in a field of prancing poppies

You wake up having gone under with a stellar view up the underside of Equius’s nostrils, and a certainty that if you died now, your ghost would not only have to spend the next eternity endlessly frustrated with fail, but would have to do so tricked out in the latest generation of earthhuman robotware, and that said robotframe would never be so tasteful as a bit of pinstriping or flames on your grille.

Oh no, roboVantas would probably float through the ages in a fluorescent plaid kilt, sparkly knit legwarmers, and a prancing glitter pony painted on your roboglutes. Dave would probably draw human schlongs on your chassis. You don’t know why it is so imperative to differentiate between a skirt and kilt, but humans are strange and the kilt is the one that dictates that underthings are verboten, so considering the hoofbeast fancying enginleers involved, it would definitely be a kilt.

You wake up attending what appears to be your own corpse party, minus the box. But the point is, you wake up.

Gamzee is there, of course. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that you wake up on top of Gamzee and his collection of bony extremities. Your moirail does not make for comfortable upholstery, he’s all bones and jitters, but he’s freaking perfect for an instant pile. You just can’t quite coordinate your squawkbox or limbs to reciprocate.

Aradia and Feferi are like twin grinning fairy godlusii over an ugly mammalian grubbaby in a bassinet. (Spoiler: the ugly grub is you.)

You’re still pretty out of it. Your leg hurts like cullbait only halfway through a forking. Your skinned palms are itchy. You ache from ribs to knees. You have a headache. But you’re not so out of it that it’s not weird as Dave and a flock of attendant metaphors when you get twin hugs from the bookends of the spectrum. Four rumblespheres and your squashed cartilaginous sniffnub. What even?

“We’re so HAPPY that you’re going to be all right,” pronounces the closest troll you know to an incarnation of Life. She’s wearing a skirt made of jellyfish and the tendrils rise and fall in invisible waves. Some of the tendrils trail off and you turn your head enough to see a pink one tied in a bow with a crackle of Sollux’s blue energy. Another trails off until it is wraps a coil around Tavros’s left horn.

“Good show,” states the closest troll you know to an incarnation of Death, attired in a skirt of snakes. The snakes wave their heads and hiss at you. Two of them have their tongues tangled in each other’s. A third is climbing a jellyfish tendril and appears to be looking up Feferi’s skirt.

There are blurs in the air behind both of them, falling stars, or the streaks of Bees, tiny glowing faerie bulls, or ships on fire falling through the Alternian atmosphere in the echo of the Vast Glub. Your head hurts. So much.

Time is slipping through your claws and you haven’t sharpened them enough to hold on. You have a deadline. What is it? You can’t remember. But it’s important. What happened? Spiders. There were spiderbots and they’ve left webs in your brainpan. Very slovenly. The Condesce expects better mental hygiene.

The girls link their arms and they go swimming off, skirts still intertwined. Or possibly this is part of a continued hallucination?

Hallucinated Tavros tells you that he is glad to know that you will recover and use your own ambulatory limbs to ambulate. Then possible hypothetical Tavros sprouts six pairs of dragonfly wings with mint chocolate stripes and pinwheels off after the girls in their skirts, stripes whirling hypnotically. His wheeled chair whines and rolls after him. The room smalls like bitter almonds and burnt sugar.

Sollux hangs back and just stares at you while way-too-real Terezi flicks a quick taste of your temple and feels up your horns. “Just to be sure that they are intact, short stuff,” she assures you. You don’t believe her. Not one bit. Her voice is deeper than usual, underlined by a growl to which no one else seems to react. She leaves and from the corner of your eyes you can see the thrash of a mighty tail in her wake, the shadow of wings against the walls. Why does no one else notice?

There’s a dark blurry column against the wall, Agent Coulson, or possibly, Phil? You’re not sure if he’s on duty, but probably not if he’s here? You assume his two baby agents that came with Equius have escaped Special Mediculler Adventure Times without further incident. Depending on how much time passed, they might still be showering. You take a cautious sniff but can’t quite coordinate raising your arm and inhaling. You can smell faint blood, disinfectant, stupidity, and Bees. You can’t differentiate Equius-variety sweat in the forecast.

The pale blur on the top of the dark column nods at you and leaves. Is there something wrong with your eyes? You blink and flail but can’t coordinate a swipe that rubs at them. It would be just your luck to take your eyes out this way. The Terezi-and-Sollux division would laugh themselves silly, then try to teach you smell-o-vision. Well Terezi would. Sollux would just be along to laugh at you. It is a comfortable dynamic, like well-worn foot-pods, reliable, like your continuing relationship with failure.

A Steve-shaped blur detaches itself from the wall and says something to you just outside of arms length, you flail-wave an ambiguous answer to you have no idea what and Steve follows Phil. You’re relieved the adults are leaving. They are not intolerable and have in fact made no threatening moves throughout your stay here. You’re pretty sure that they would actually stand between you all and anything threatening, as bizarre as that is. Bruce is the best thing to happen to Gamzee since he didn’t get eaten in the caverns.

You still feel better when they’re gone, though that still leaves the room pretty crowded with the usual crowd of ignoramuses, and you’re not sure why you’re all in Sollux’s hivesuite, but you can feel the Bee vibration in your teeth. You’re pretty sure you’re not picking up radio waves in your teeth, but not entirely. The forecast is for rain and continued stupidity.

Nepeta’s eyes are round but her voice is deliberately light, like this is just another role-play. She’s wearing a headdress with elegant furred ears longer than Jade’s. The headdress has a long mane and she looks like a petite version of the cavetroll from “In Which A Teal Interrigologist Falls Through A Time Vortex Into A Far Distant Past And Is Forced To Institute The Hemospectrum Among Primitives, Containing Two Dozen Hunting Scenes, A Pale Dalliance By Firelight With A Primitive Green Chieftainess, The Consumption Of Inadequately Cooked Beast Meats, And The Just Death Of A Traitor To The Empire.”

Nepeta’s headdress ears flick and turn like antennae as she speaks, and something in your digestive sack heaves a bit at the thought of comparing any of your friends to the pale love interest in one of your romance movies. You’ll never be able to look her in the face again.

“The brave huntress is much purrlieved that the fierce and mighty Karkatbeast will recover!”

She leans in, way in, and for a moment you are drowning in green, even though her eyes have only just begun to turn. The warmth of her hands on your arm is overwhelming. You can feel a growl start up from Gamzee and you flail a bit to try to find an angle to introduce a papping. You can feel a growl from Nepeta, but she starts to back up, then darts in and kisses you on the cheek, warm dry lips with just the faintest swipe of a rough tongue.

You can feel your mouth opening and closing like a drowning fish. That was absolutely not pitch in any way and you don’t think it was pale, and YOU HAVE NO WORDS. Where are your words? Where did they run off to? Did you leave the heating element on?

You manage to turn your head as she backs up.

“The huntress would also like to reapurrsure Karkitten that he is abspurrlutely without robot parts. The noble hoofbeast was very catful. Also, the huntress would offer an apurrology for not asking purrmission, but she would have regretted it if she had never tried.”

She licks her lips entirely too slowly and turns and you can see a tasseled tail flicking side to side and you don’t believe she’s sorry at all. You’re a little bit terrified and more than a little bit intrigued but obviously so high you have no idea how much of this is in your head. You’re not sure if you should be embarrassed about what just happened or embarrassed about what you just imagined. You’re just pretty sure that you should be embarrassed.

Sollux rolls his chair over with a push and swivel like a spaceship gravitational slingshot maneuver. He’s still frowning at you, and he flicks a finger against your left horn so that your head rings with it, a cascade of human church bells in an empty tower. Joke’s on him, your brainpan is already so empty it echoes, and you’re pretty sure there’s no one home to hear. He spins his wheeled chair around with a “Jerkath!” and goes rolling off to the sound of buzzing. It doesn't sound challenging, just tired. Clearly this is still the dream part of the hallucination. What do they have you on? And why is everyone trying to _touch_ you?

As much as you ache, you can feel the sharp edges of pain sliding past one another under the thick cover of some sort of interference, terrible sea beasts just under the waves. Your mouth is dry and tastes like the aftermath of an unbearable sweetness.

Kanaya and Rose extend their wishes for a speedy recovery, and thank the little primate deities, don’t try to join the Happy Wriggler Karkat Touching Party, so go you. Vriska tells you that she could have done better, but that it wasn’t a bad performance for a runty runt. Vriska can go walk her ruby red pair of pirate boots off a pier of indeterminate length. You’re pretty sure you tell her this. She doesn’t try to touch you. Go you.

Eridan is quiet, at least until you challenge him to glub or get. Then he leans in, or starts to, until Gamzee looms back. Eridan backs up and tells you, earnestly, “Tha wwas some pretty impressivve wwork, Kar. But maybe next time ya can wwait fa backup?”. You can see his earfins lift and pin and flick and you’re positive that if you just concentrate hard enough you will spontaneously understand seadweller.

You think you tell him that if there’s a next time, he better be there faster, or there won’t be anything to back up, or at least you try. Your mouth is so dry, and your tongue is a fat lethargic worm.

You think he smiles a bit, but you’re not sure, distracted by a nimbus of light around his head, dark hoofbeasts racing through white clouds, a slow spinning motion like the dragonfly wings. It makes you dizzy until you close your eyes. You can hear Darcy wish you well, or something like it, and haul him away. She is not entirely without redeeming qualities. Who would have thought that all Eridan needed was the complete and undivided attention of one person who takes him exactly as seriously as he needs to be taken, no more and no less? Wait, that sounds strangely logical, and logic and Eridan are not on speaking terms, so it must be the drugs.

You open your eyes to blue, and you wait for the earth sky to resolve itself into nonsensical hoofbeasts again, but the blue is John, the white is the shine of his ~~endearing~~ enormous buckteeth and as he leans back, his knuckles are white, but he laughs and tells you that you won’t get away so easily, even if it’s in that tone of voice that’s a bit too manic to be humorous. You are too tired to properly tell him off. That’s pretty tired, possibly akin to half dead.

Jade tells you that if you had died, she would have made sure that you had pumpkins painted on your robo-ass. You’re not sure how that is supposed to be encouraging, except at least you know that you’re not the only one who’s planning for contingencies.

Dave drawls out something long and twisty and you can’t follow it. You’d love to shoot back the short salvo that would utterly collapse his no doubt longwinded, utterly redundant winding metaphor before it has to put itself out of its own misery over its failure of an existence, but you feel like you’re skipping time, you can see his mouth move and you just can’t keep track of what the corresponding sounds are.

There are words and figures and symbols and constellations hanging in the air… Alternian, English, Beenary, ~Ath, Hex, and things you don’t recognize, possibly Arabic, kanji, hieroglyphics, scratches that might be Ancient Alternian... You lift a hand to swipe at one and Hope lands on your outstretched graspfronds like a flapbeastbug. Its little proboscis stabs you and drinks your blood, you shake your hand until it falls off.

“Palest of fine Brothers, it is not being real. Shake it off. It can’t get its hurting on,” rumbles the mountain under you, the growl converted from the sense of an eruptive threat to a sense of protection. Whatever indignities you have visited upon yourself, only one chucklehead will be within arm’s reach of your sorry carcass to perpetuate more, at least until Gamzee feels otherwise. You feel something tense in you relax, though it hurts in a different way now, in your bloodpusher and your head.

When you look over his arms again, a shadow resolves itself into least-douchy Strider. Dove looks back at you and you have no idea how long he’s been there. He has a book and he sort of salutes you and turns back to it, without so much as a “s’up?”. You can feel the horn echo of Gamzee’s tiniest spiderfeet of chucklevoodoos and Dove still doesn’t say anything, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react when Gamzee tries to menace him into leaving. Dove cocks his head in your shared direction and the spiderfeet trail off. Dove goes back to his book.

It’s only when you’re falling back asleep and hear voices above you that you realize Bruce has been beside Gamzee, behind you, the whole time. Huh.

*

You dream that your runty nubby horns sprout into antlers, tine after tine after tine, growing heavier like water flowing into a canteen, until each movement of your head is a motion and decision fraught with consequences.

You are standing in a forest and then you are running in the forest.

There are barkbeasts baying and you are the crowned hunter on a fast mount, its four hooves crashing and thundering, the great ribcage beneath you heaving with the bellows of its lungs. You guide it with your knees and hands, with your will, and you can hear an equal thunder of blood rushing beneath you, ahead of you.

You are the prey, tossing its heavy crowned head and running.

You are the barkbeasts with their red, red ears on their lusus-white bodies, circling the antlerbeast that wears the same horns as your consciousness on the galloping hoofbeast’s back.

You are both the prey and the hunter as the pack brings it down.

You are the troll chained to the stone for the last few hours of your always stolen life.

You are the hungry crowd watching.

You are kneeling in darkness and something above you is pressing down, gloating, telling you that everything dies, but you don’t have to be alone until you do, that all you have to do is give in.

You tell the faceless figure to go fuck itself.


	12. Karkat: Climb the walls. Oh wait…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Karkat is laid up with a broken leg, catches up on polysci reading and a few other pieces of choice literature, and…

Argh. You are the cullbait in a plaster cast and you can’t reach The Itch. Where’s your stupidly-likely-to-give-you-sepsis coat hanger? Or that mobile bag of coat hangers and static and smug Doom?

Your cast is marked in an eye-searing Bingo grid of red and blue, B12 is ground zero for an Itch that can only be described as maddening, and Sollux-four-eyes-Captor is entirely AWOL. More importantly, his convenient psionics, the only thing that can get under the cast, are inconveniently unavailable, quite possibly in the company of the only other psionic resident. He seldom leaves his Bee Hives, so it is, of course, your typical luck that now should be the exception.

You let him _paint_ your cement block of a cast with a garish red and blue BINGO grid, and now, when you need him, he’s an absentee landdwelling impotentate.

You contemplate digging through the cast with your claws but know that it would be a case of Wack-A-Burrowing-Mammal. You are positive that as fast as you reached one itch, another would spring forth, a fountaining hydra-head of shittastic Herculean labors.

You can’t fall asleep. The only thing you can do is try to distract yourself.

You lean over the couch edge and survey your territory, currently five piles of books, a water bottle, and a “picnic lunch”, complete with a red and white checkered cloth which Eridan assures you is “an authentic parta tha experience”. Wah wah wwah. He is a ridiculous hipster and _food does not need scarves_.

A Bee zooms over and hovers over your nose, cocks its cocky little head until its whole body is slantwise. You wave it off. You don’t know what their game is, but you don’t trust it any further than you can throw them. Granted, you could chuck them pretty far, but they’re Bees, they can fly, so it’s not like it would make a difference.

The longer you spend in the company of the Bees, the more you start envisioning them as tiny smug Solluxes. What’s the plural of Sollux? A Swarm? A Cackle? A Plague? A Knot? (A Nerd of Solluxes?) Ehehehehe.

Ugh. Now you really want to trap a Swarm of Solluxes under a glass and leave them on hold while you eat bon-bons and tap on the glass. _We are extheperiencing higher than normal call volume. Your call ith important to uth. Pleathe hold._

That is ridiculous of course. Sollux would never bother with the social niceties, which is why he’s never going to be in a “public facing” form of employment, he’s just going to live within a series of small dimly lit indoor places until he fails to notice that he’s shuffled off the mortal coil.

You’ve heard that trolls turn out like their lusii, but you don’t know if his Bees turned out like him or he turned out like the hideously doomed offspring of his Bees and BiclopsDad. This is stupid. Clearly The Itch is winning, and that is not on.

You queue up a small selection of books and start to read aloud from your now well-thumbed pocket-size booklet _The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America_. There’s no one to hear but Bees and JARVIS, and maybe if you are loud enough, you can drown out The Itch.

You would fight anyone who might try to point it out, but as much as you love your romances, there’s something intensely, fiercely compelling in these idealistic exhortations. You’d call it exultant, except that, legally, you’re still a mutant, and not yet a citizen, and those are both still dangerous things to be, and only one may ever be remedied.

There are “illegal aliens” and mutants all over the news and vicious public debates that all seem to be endless rounds of fruitless frond-stabbing. It doesn’t make you feel better that almost everyone in the tower is in the same aquatic vessel. Thor has diplomatic immunity. Loki survived being used as a wriggler toy by the Hulk. You can’t imagine either of them ever feeling as vulnerable as you do.

You finish the booklet and pause to take a drink. The Itch has died down a bit, no doubt plotting its triumphant return with minions. You are surprised to notice that there is a congregation of Bees on the couch arms and back, and on your cast. They are all _staring_ at you. Freaky.

You pull out a wriggler book, _We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures_ for shits and jiggles, because, one, there isn’t a single _human_ in the room, JARVIS included, and two, Darcy still pretends you haven’t caught on to her reeducation agenda. It’s not an appreciation of _irony_. Dave Strider can go choke on Lady Liberty’s ginormous green bulge, or whatever else she’s got stashed under her voluminous robes. Please. You are adept at deciphering propaganderist dreck. Just because you don’t disagree with the message doesn’t mean you’re not analyzing it. You’re not so blind as to fail to see a metaphor when it’s dancing about and fanning its tail feathers. If she tries to feed you _Animal Farm_ again, you’re going to feed it to ~~Boxer~~ Equius.

You finish and flip through one of Gamzee’s poetry books and read a few. “To make a prairie…” goes over well. Your congregation now includes larvae too. You are the happy Bee schoolfeeding inculculator. It is you. Your lusus would be so proud. Skree-freaking-skree. You wish he was here.

You pull over a hardcover book with a disembodied head and attendant hive infestation on a white and black cover, _A Light in the Attic_. Gamzee has drawn horns on it in Sharpie. You flip through and it’s all short poems and drawn illustrations. Gamzee has repeated the horn treatment throughout, no blood colors, just tri-colored horns in all shapes, some familiar, and the occasional commentary in pen. You page through and skip around to some of the ones that have clearly received previous attention.

The poems are mostly nonsense, with a sly humor akin to your moirail’s, short enough that they’ve defeated even his spacy attention span.

“SPELLING BEE” causes a great commotion among the Bees. Some of the adults perform loop de loops and the larvae fall over like they’re laughing. Gamzee’s given the figure Eridan’s horns.

“THE MAN IN THE IRON PAIL MASK” has been given Dave’s shades. You approve. You’re pretty sure the Bees are snickering. Two of the little hooligans seem to deliberately bump their rears together and peel off in loops. You think this might be the Bee equivalent of a “fistbump”. (Beebump? Rumpbump? Never mind, clearly the drugs are winning. And by drugs, you mean extremely diluted solution of mindhoney, as prescribed by the sweaty engineerist that’s been drafted as the closest thing you have to a mediculler. Not that a real mediculler would have helped. You’re a mutant and there’s only one course of treatment for that.)

The page for “WILD STRAWBERRIES” is slightly wrinkled, with the commentary “d3l1c1ous” in an unnecessarily incriminating teal, and you hope that you are not about to be at ground zero for the backlash from the intentionally imbecilic kismesis Olympics.

Tavros’s neat brown handwriting uses the large blank section above “SHAKING” to advise that aH, mOOBEASTS, rEALLY, dON’T lIKE tHAT. Gamzee has used the rest of the space to write a chocolate blackberry milkshake recipe and something you can’t quite decipher about Tavros’s “milkshake”. By “can’t quite decipher”, you mean that you’re going to claw your vision units out and pour bleach in the holes if you have to look at it again. Your moirail handed you this book and told you it was full of MiRaClEs and not boobytraps. You should know by now that he has no shame.

On the two page spread “SNAKE PROBLEM”, the exceedingly ugly child with your horns is being propositioned by a snake with your moirail’s and you can get over your self-conscious awareness of the homely child to see your moirail’s shameless, pitiable declaration. It makes you grimace to conceal a traitorous smile.

Your moirail has drawn a seagoat’s tail on the landgoat under “BLAME”, with a scrawling list of all the other things that its negligent ass-less ass failed to do or screwed up. The lines in Gamzee’s drawings waver, though they ultimately resolve to surprisingly intelligible forms, but his handwriting is terrible. Still, the frustration it causes to decipher his list is worth it, because, if you had your way, it would be longer and sooner in coming, but this is your moirail’s journey and you can’t rush it, though the next time you pile, you’re going to be digging down into this like Rose into Dave’s cracked cranium.

“THEY’VE PUT A BRASSIERE ON THE CAMEL” briefly causes silence among your audience. You are not sure how, when they were already pretty quiet, but the buzzing dies down. There’s a tiny doodle of Kanaya in the corner of the page, aghast at this undergarment travesty, and a blob of brown and black lines that you absolutely refuse to focus on. Too late. You didn’t need to see that.

Then a fight breaks out, and you nearly piss yourself laughing as Bees tumble through the air, swarming, buzzing each other, tackling each other, and playing Very Serious Imitations of Cluckbeast Roulette. You know why these pages are disturbing to you, but you have no clue what the Bees’ issue is. (It will take another few weeks to find out from Sollux that the Bees were debating uniforms and Hives I and II were duking it out over the color scheme, sweatervests, and messenger bags. Clearly, Sollux is so scattered that even his buzzbeasts have flapbeasts in their towers.)

You can only put up with a certain level of nonsensical violence, however inefficient, so as the fight breaks up and some of the Bees buzz off, you switch volumes.

You flip through another book and catch a section highlighted in florescent purple-blue:

But a bird that stalks  
down his narrow cage  
can seldom see through  
his bars of rage  
his wings are clipped and  
his feet are tied  
so he opens his throat to sing.

Shit and damn. Your diamond isn’t even here right now and he’s going to make you cry with how pitiable he is. Time to find something else before you’re too choked up to tell the Bees off for turning you into a free nursery schoolfeed.

Over the past few months, interrupted only by the fallout from Doom’s public temper tantrum, you have been reading through stacks of books and padfeeds on the basics of human psychology, therapy, pan development in human wrigglers, and feral children, along with the assortment of odds and ends that everyone sees fit to drop off in your “recommended reading” pile.

You brain feels like it was attempting a concupiscent visit with Rose’s horrorterror familiars and “Stockholm syndrome”, “attachment therapy”, “PTSD”, and “the lesser evil” have been pecking at your brainmeat like a rabid flock of Dove’s tiny suitors. You feel like your skull contains fried avian ova, choked up sinuses, confusion, and little else. Possibly horrorterror jizz.

So much of Alternian culture is considered abusive or wrong by American human standards and law. You feel simultaneously under attack, and yet you don’t want to defend Alternian culture unconditionally, find that as it unravels under analysis, you’re having trouble separating what it means to be a _troll_ from what it means to _belong to the Empire_.

In the aftermath of the destruction of your universe, you are utterly homesick for the familiar, even if “going home” might as well mean “dying horribly and pointlessly”.

English is not your native tongue. No one can explain how you all know it, but even as it is essential to have at least one foothold into the culture in which you are immersed, you can’t help but wonder what else the Game changed _inside your head_.

You know that none of you, troll or human, are quite _well_. The adults in the tower aren’t exactly shining examples of pristine mental health, but they all have coping methods. But your _worlds are gone_.

 _Everyone_ you knew, your lusii, their parents, your asshole neighbors that didn’t bother to heckle you as much as they could and occasionally even did something that could be construed of as not intentionally offensive, _everything_ might as well have never existed, and _you should be more upset_. You should be screaming and crying and throwing things, now that it’s safe to break down for at least a little while, now that it might be a weakness, but there’s no one to cull you for it. But nobody has.

You think about Dirk. He doesn’t have anyone but all you asses he just met, and imitations of people he admired. You don’t think he’s left the tower since you got here. You’re pretty sure that the Strider Code is pretending to be so many automatons to blend in with all the versions that were literally constructs, but you’re also pretty sure Bro treats it more as an ironic joke than Dirk’s iron rule. You hope he’s just waiting for the Project to be completed. However it goes, you’re going to have to be sure he leaves at some point. According to your vast stack of recreational reading, humans are obligate daywalkers and they need sunlight or they slowly crumble. Freaks. It’s like designing an organism that needs radiation, just not much. Opps. Can’t see how _that_ can go wrong. Whoever designed humans sure did a fittingly shitty job.

You skip over Rose’s books on psychology and therapy, full of horrors, studies, anecdotes of other people’s problems related in a dry isn’t-it-interesting scientific drone. You aren’t up for the concentration necessary for Kanaya’s biochem tomes. You skip the philosophy books from Bruce. You set aside the SHIELD Handbook that Phil left. You’ve already added your own extensive marginalia regarding everything you found to be stupid.

Darcy’s left you some of what she assured you are “the finest of Janet Evanovich’s fucktabulous newjersey hoochiemama prettyboy romping chicklit” but you are just not up to deciphering it right now. You skip over comic books from John and Dave, trying not to see any details for fear of their stupidity infecting you.

Pepper’s left you the text for an MBA class, but you just don’t have time for something that will probably make you fall asleep anyway. There’s a “Programmiing for Idiiot2 (Thii2 Mean2 You, KK)” tutorial in your inbox and you rather suspect that it would result in the same. Despite the fact that you have been essentially squatting in his hivesuite for over a week, Sollux still messages you more often than he actually talks. Aradia makes him leave periodically so you can have some time to yourself, which is kind and also hilarious. Sollux is not one for voluntary fieldtrips.

Last time Aradia came through she just hefted Sollux up over a shoulder and he just kept tapping at his Starkphone as she headed out the door. You don’t know what she had planned, but they were out for hours and when he got back he had a sunflush across his cheekbones, was wearing a clean shirt, and his hair had clearly also been cleaned. Aradia is fucking formidable and you love her. Platonically.

She’s also left you a book on dead human civilizations that looks as dry as the dirt from which the evidence was scavenged, so you skip over that. Tavros has left you a book on “dinosaurs”, all theories, skeletons, and artist renderings, and, looking at the sizes, you’ve very glad that they are mostly all dead. You could handle an emu or ostrich if you had to, but you don’t trust that tyrannosaurus and its tiny bovine-tipping hands.

Eridan’s left you a human world mythology book and some art books. He’s made himself useful since you first woke after your usual stupendous act of stupidity came hive to roost, surprisingly amendable to fetch and carry. You may, possibly, have asked for some ridiculous things that could only be obtained at certain locations, ranging from frou-frou caffeinated beverages, to obscure baked confections such as “Cronuts”, macarons and ebelskiver in odd flavors, just because your bitter and worldly soul mistrusts this, but you’ve slowed up on that front because staring the hoofbeast in the mouth is likely to get you bit.

Still, you spent a very amusing four hours steering him around the city to various food trucks, coordinating the vender twitter feeds with your internal whimsy and his phone’s GPS and plotting out paths and public transit. You ran him through the subway a few times and jogged him across Central Park twice and you only let him come home after he couldn’t carry any more. But you’re a gentletroll so while you made him reheat it, you did share. Of course, you shared with Gamzee too, so Eridan might have been encouraged to move along pretty quickly.

Also, there are now no less than six ebelskiver pans in the tower and there was that otherwise unobjectionable Saturday brunch when there was mass competition to come up with new flavors that almost came to blows despite Steve. The whole thing only ended without hot iron injuries because John got beaned with a peanut butter and jelly version, and promptly broke out in hives. All peanut products have since been banned from the tower and Tony’s promised to make an ebelskiver robot. Dave has been aggressively whining about apples and Clint’s still stumping for nacho cheese and jalapeno filling whenever the topic comes up. Gamzee has been baking overtime to try out every edible tree-nut known to humankind. How have the flailing mass of you failed to accidently off each other? You’re not ungrateful, just confused.

You pull your Starktablet out of the pile, check your email and the internal message board, surf Amazon a bit, and log into Eridan’s library account to reserve a few things while you’re thinking of them. They’ll send him an email when they come in, and you won’t even have to give him instructions. You don’t know from whence this useful-Eridan came, but you’re determined to get your full invalid’s due before he skeeves off into usual-Eridan.

You write Clint a scathing note and tuck it back into the book of short stories he lent you, replacing his bookmark at Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”. You’re not sure why he thought you needed to read this drivel about a human pupating and becoming alienated from his family. You totally didn’t cry when Gregor’s shell cracked, you just couldn’t help but picture CrabDad and wonder what his last moments were like.

You make sure to channel your frustration into extra helpings of vitriol, with just enough self-control to avoid tearing the paper with the pen tip. The next time Eridan comes through you’ll send him to deliver it. You can limp along just fine with your crutches, but you haven’t yet finessed your balance enough to whomp someone without being left unsteady.

You check the next book down the pile and change your mind. The one is also from Clint, and you should have set it on fire instead of flipping through it at all. It’s all about “The Joker” and you don’t need fictionalized violence and psycho clowns, Clinton Barton, you’ve already lived through more than enough of your own. Worse, because you will always feel more hesitant about defending yourself than your moirail, Gamzee doesn’t need to see this shit. You toss it in the trash and dump half a melted milkshake on top. It was strawberry anyhow. Eridan has terrible taste in desserts, it’s like he doesn’t even try them.

You pull the first book back and set it in a new spot. You’re going to send it via motherfucking clown express and have Gamzee leave a honking business card in every freaking one of Clint’s ventilation piles.

You open up a messaging app to tell him as much.

CG: Clinton. Your choice of books is drivel. Chapter upon chapter of excessively moist fecal matter that dribbled and sputtered from the hind quarters of a sick trunked tuskbeast. Or possibly a Jackass. Like you.

CB: Nah, I vote Green-Rainbow.

WTF?

CG: Do not try to troll a Troll, Barton. I will send in the clown.

CB: Sorry, kid, gotta go.

And he _ignores_ you. _This_ _will not do_. The logical part of you knows that he may very well be at work and unable to reply, and that “at work” may involve life-and-death-shooting-scenarios, but the itch-motivated restless part of you just wants a fight and there are no prospects.

You open up Nepeta's shared document on the house server and change Clint’s sexual orientation to rainbow-shitting-one-horned-hoofbeast. You change his alias from Hawkeye to Smegma Barton. Go ahead, fit that on a tee-shirt, Barton.

You huff a bit at the effort you’ve expended to express your ire and find it a bit disappointing that there’s no one to respond. You limp around the room a whole two times. You think the Bees are mocking you because you can feel in your hornsense that there are clumps of them flying behind you, but every time you turn, they’re pretending to be about their business. Cowards.

You swipe a few of Sollux’s shuriken and you toss them at the corkboard, shuffle over to retrieve them. You throw yourself onto the couch with a bit too much vigor, wince and scowl and shift. You lean back and play with a shuriken and you prick yourself. You lean forward and stare at the blood beading up, something half remembered competing with the usual panic. Did you really…?

You concentrate and the bead of blood detaches, floats in the air. You zoom it about a bit, waving fingers to direct it. A few Bees start to follow the drop and you zoom it around the whole room as the swarm follows like a freaking meteorite. You flick your fingers and it splits to go around Sollux’s chair and the swarm splits and reconvenes on the other side. Okay, this is kind of neat. Just a bit. Fuck it, this is _awesome_.

You zoom the drop back and watch it, flick both your wrists like your sickles just ought to be there, and for a moment you think you feel the weight of them, but then it’s gone. You flick a few more times, and you know it’s gone. You close your eyes and concentrate and you can feel the blood in your vascular channels, pump to delicate lacy capillaries, you can feel it moving and you can feel which ones are delivering oxygen and which ones are returning for it. Freaky.

You think that you didn’t draw quite enough blood for your sickles and you concentrate and feel a headache build and the world hiccups and you can _feel_ the edges of your blades, the weight, the balance, and the only thing off is the thunder of your pulse and that JARVIS is speaking VERY LOUDLY. You absentmindedly send the shadow of your sickles away to wait and calm your pulse and open your eyes.

There are Bees all over your face and head and there’s a bunch of tiny legs tapping your skin and scalp and you think they are papping you. You wave an arm to shoo them off.

“ – antas! Mr. Vantas! Can you hear me? Do you require medical attention? I will call for assistance-”

“No, I’m fine, JARVIS. What happened?”

“Your pulse doubled and your heart skipped several beats. Your pulse has since returned to regular resting levels and your heart has not skipped since. Do you require medical attention?”

“No, really, I’m fine.” And because you know that Tony has no doubt fed him that line before, you explain a bit. There is only one entity in the tower that doesn’t BS, and that’s JARVIS. You kind of feel bad for worrying him.

“I was messing with something I wasn’t sure I remembered correctly, but I figured it out and won’t bother you with it again. Thank you for your concern.” There, that was suitably polite and even mostly sincere. JARVIS either buys it or is too polite to disagree without further medical issues, so you try not to think further on how crazy it is that he knows what everyone is doing in the tower, all the time, unceasingly. You think for a moment about knowing Loki or Vriska’s every physical motion or verbal barb and you shudder. Dave would be bad enough, just because Dave never shuts up, and Dave isn’t even plotting anything. Probably.

Still, the rush of successfully summoning your weapons without death as the impetus or result leaves you triumphant and you can’t help but smile, thankful that the Bees and JARVIS are the only witness.

You turn back to the pile of books and read something fluffy and colorful from Nepeta. You can’t remember the title within a few seconds of reading it, but it has romance and shenanigans and you tear through the next two volumes and the Bees huddle close and listen and there are occasional Bee shenanigans in response to the romance and so you determine that perhaps the Bees are better company for this than any of the other tenants of this insane asylum, because the Bees at least appreciate a romance. Two of them are tangoing along to the last dance scene and one pair of wings stills as they go in for the dip. That’s it, you’re enticing a few Bees back to your block when you finish recuperating, Sollux clearly doesn’t encourage them to get a well-rounded education. Troglodyte.

You get to the bottom of a narrow teetering pile and find a book Jade dropped off. You crack open a copy of _Animals In Translation_. It’s surprisingly engrossing. You wonder if it has anything on Bees.

You finish the book silently, voice mostly gone after so long narrating for the Bees, and you wonder again if Dirk is on the autism spectrum or just OCD. The fastest way to find out would be to ask Rose, but, in case that was not already on her radio-detection-scope, well, you’re not that mean as to set her on him. Well, not unless he provokes you.

A few more hours pass in this manner and you manage to make it to and from the ablution block twice without damaging yourself further. You pick up one of Gamzee’s books again. The spine is cracked and it falls open to a page, underlined in red, with a bar of intertwined green and purple marching alongside in the margin. You read the poem from the beginning and when you reach the highlighted section, it is like a punch in your most tender organ meats:

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,  
They have to take you in.”                                       

                                   “I should have called it  
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Something you will never admit, under pain of The Itch or Death or The Game, because there is no way that you’re letting Gamzee assume the blame for your shitty life choices, is that the reason you were alone on the street last week was that your moirail has become obsessed with weird fruit preserves. The stranger they are, the happier he is to experiment, and consume, and try to feed them to everyone else in sandwiches, and cookies, and ice cream. Of course, the absolutely only place one would ever find his current favorite (gooseberry-chai-hint-of-horseradish) is this one stall run by grandmotherly lesbian hippies at a farmers’ market in the Big Apple. If he was just obsessed with jalapenos, you could order online.

You have come to be at peace, more or less, with the likelihood that, one way or another, your hapless moirail will be the death of you. If you had died, it would have just been this universe catching up on your own universe’s personal grudge. You just didn’t think, of all the ways that he might be hapless and dangerous to himself or to you, that his _eloquence_ , his pale diamond feelings, would be what hurt the most.

*

Notes:

“To make a prairie”, Emily Dickinson

 _A Light in the Attic_ , Shel Silverstein

“Caged Bird”, Maya Angelou

“The Death of the Hired Man”, Robert Frost

( _Animals In Translation_ , Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson)


	13. Whine and Dine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The nerds in R&D have failed to provide refrigerator offerings to our favorite would-be drow pirate queen. Eridan is in the kitchen attempting to be useful, or at least helpful in the spirit of enlightened self-interest. Two kids have a heart-to-heart (sorta) in an alien food-prep block and no one gets stabbed.

It’s a Saturday and the tower is quieter than usual. You don’t have anything to do and you’re kind of hungry. Or possibly so bored that it’s the same thing. You find yourself systematically checking every refrigerator in the building, in both the residential and office sections. That has to be _at least 8 dozen_ and there’s _nothing_ to eat, and no prospects to pester into buying you food. But at least you’ve killed two hours. Yup, those hours are deader than Mom’s dinners.

Dirk is welding in the basement. Bruce is wandering through one of the labs doodling on the whiteboards with a marker. He hasn’t noticed the places where he’s started on the walls, so even if he’s one of the more tolerable cooks, that door’s currently closed. Gamzee is napping in Karkat’s lap on the couch in Bee-boy’s hiveroom. _Ugh_. It’s like they didn’t take into account the sensibilities of people passing in the vents. (When you pile John, you make absolutely sure that one, no one suspects, and two through eight, you’ve blocked all entrances and potential surveillance. _No one must know_.)

It’s not like most everyone in the tower is _always_ here, Terezi, for one, has been gone most of the time since Karkat’s “accident”, but even Jade, Equius, and Sollux are elsewhere of some sort. It’s like everyone knows something you don’t, and that is _not_ an acceptable state of affairs.

You find yourself back in front of the most promising prospect for dinner, the refrigerator on the informal “library” level where everyone is most likely to congregate. There’s a whole lot of plant matter of various sorts, lots of cold raw meat paste, unfertilized avian ova, bovine lactation, spongy baked grain loaf. You could eat the meat paste raw, but it’s cold and bloodless. You sigh and slam the fridge, just as Eridan closes a cabinet behind you. You _totally_ don’t jump.

“Anythin good, Vvris?”

“Blergh. It’s all gross human food. Give me your credit chit, I’m all out.”

“Sorry, Vvris, mine’s pretty loww too. I wwas gonna make somethin, ya wwanna stick around an see if ya wwant some?” Ugh. Every time you think that there _could not actually be_ someone with such an obnoxious accent, Eridan proves you wrong. He’s pulling stuff out of another cabinet as he goes, so it looks like he’ll be here a while “wwhatevva” you say.

“What are you making?”

“Meatballs, red sauce, maybe pasta.” He pulls an apparatus out of the cabinet, dumps it on the counter next to you and plugs it in.

“What makes it red?”

“Tomatoes.” He gestures to the mound of red on the table. You are quite sure it wasn’t there when you got here. How out of it were you that you didn’t notice him enter? “Tha’re a fruit. Or maybe a vvegetable, tha par’s a bit unclear.”

“ _Argh_! More plant matter!”

“Nah, tha’re pretty good, if ya knoww wwha ya’re doin.” He pulls out a flat board and a knife and the part of you that briefly considered him a kismesis is at attention. You ignore it. (The part of you that was a veteran fatal leaguer is pretty much _always_ at attention.)

“And you think _you_ do?”

“Enough ta nah mess up too bad... and a course there’s a secret.” He flicks out a few green things from the mound of red. He doesn’t look up.

“Really? Can’t be _that_ interesting.” Unspoken is the “if _you_ know”, but you feel that your voice conveys this quite adequately.

“Tha secret is tha as long as it’s tasty, ya just pretend it’s wwha ya meant ta do.” He slices the tomatoes with a flurry of quick strokes.

“Booooooooring.” You emphasize this with an eyeroll so he knows you mean it, but he’s not looking, too busy coordinating fingers, steel, and squishy red bulbous plant matter.

“Nah, competence is sexy. So’s confidence.” He spins the knife once and winks at you, then promptly, before you have time to properly respond, looks back down at the board full of targets and continues his slaughter of their weak little veg-asses.

“So this is really part of some ridiculous seduction thing. News flash, fish ass, I’m just _not that into you_.”

He doesn’t look up. “Nah tryin ta start somefin wwith ya. Wwha wwe had is ovver an I think wwe’re both betta off tha wway. Wwas more a business relationship anyhoww.”

“So you’re saying you don’t hate me, don’t flush me, don’t even ash me, don’t want anything to do with me, _just like everyone else_. Typical. Trying to skeeve in with the _popular_ kids, Eerie-fish?”

He puts the knife down, puts his hands flat on the table, and looks up. He’s not bracing himself. It’s like he’s _not even trying_ to be menacing.

“Vvris. _I’m nah tryin ta start somethin wwith ya_. Nah tryin ta insult ya. Nah tryin ta lure ya inta any relationship stronga than Kar’s ‘human disease knowwn as friendship’, wwhich really sounds like wwe’re all gonna be one big nah-quite-pale orgy of feelins, and frankly speakin, givves me a bit a indigestion, but ya’re _more than jus an acquaintance_.

“Wwe wwere kismesises. Noww wwe’re nah. _But_ _wwe’re nah tha same people wwe wwere then_. Wwe don’t livve on Alternia. Wwe don’t havve tha responsibilities wwe had there. Wwe don’t havve ta kill ta livve. An wwe don’t havve ta toe tha line ovver wwho’s wwha shade or wwho’s got a quad unfilled.

“I’da thought ya’d be ecstatic ovver howw much freedom wwe havve, but it’s na my job ta determine howw ya feel about it. I miss my lusus, but he’s dead. Maybe ya miss yar lusus, maybe ya don’t.”

He shrugs. And you are just so, _so_ furious. How _dare_ he act like he knows what it’s like to be you! You clench your fists, both of them, because if you don’t, you’re going to hit him, and you’re not sure you can stop if you start. It is absolutely _not_ related to being someplace “betta” than Alternia. You just know that a strong captain has to be in charge of herself before she can properly command a crew.

“That’s _none_ of your business, fail-fish! And it’s _way_ too pale for you to ask. We’re both quadranted. I’m not cheating on John. Are you trying to cheat on Darcy?”

“I’m sorry.”

Argh! Can’t he even _fight back_?!

“Ya’re right, I made ya uncomfortable, and tha’s not wwha I intended. But I also don’t think either a them wwould be jealous ta knoww tha wwe’re speakin ta one another as adults an tha no bodily harm resulted ta anyone.”

“Speak for yourself. I never promised _anything_.” You toss your horns to emphasize that, just not enough to be the type of challenging that could be construed as pitch solicitation. Well, mostly.

He sighs. How _dare_ he sound so tired of you! You’re the one doing all the work in this conversation!

“Tha misses tha point. I’m offerin ta feed ya. Ya don’t havve ta eat it, but if ya help, ya’vve reserved first dibs on tha results if they please ya. Deal?”

“Fiiiiiiiine.” You extend this extra-long to let him know that this is boring and he is boring and you are making a _mighty_ sacrifice. Meh. You don’t really have anything else to do. You flick your hair for good measure.

The thing is, you make a practice not to make deals with people that are more likely to stab you in the back than you are to stab them first, and you know that Eridan’s “wword” is good. It’s part of his ridiculous conception of what it means to be “nobility”.

Now, you, you don’t like to be pinned down and you’d double-cross someone if it suits you and doesn’t cut off more future advantages than it solves. Terezi would find a loophole if she wanted to end an “understanding”. Eridan, well, Eridan might get impatient and go back on a promise, but he’d be loud and clear and dramatic about how he “felt betrayed” long before he got around to his own outright betrayal, and that makes him predictable. Eridan’s biggest failures have always had their roots in his character flaws, and not in his technical skills.

He was a pretty good partner, for the short time it lasted: great aim, impeccable sense of timing, had an understanding of the occasional need for a pithy one-liner. He was never as sharp or styling as you, but he had to go for quantity over quality. If you could have fed your mother the occasional sky-whale, well, you probably would have taken a flarp campaign out a couple perigees just to see more of Alternia. If wishes were hoofbeasts, cullbait would feast.

You’ve never actually gotten to a bucket with anyone else besides Eridan and it was awkward enough that you both stuck to needling each other in other ways after, not that there was much to the after either. In retrospect, it felt okay, but more of an anticlimactic, “Is that really what it’s all about?” than the stuff movies and flarp arcs are made of, and maybe that was worse than if it had been outright bad. Maybe imminent drones would have spiced it up, but Eridan was so obsessed with the flush quad he _didn’t_ have that it sort of spilled over into everything.

He had the potential to be a formidable kismesis and he just didn’t treat you like you were much of a threat. You had been offended, you kind of still are, but maybe he’s just not particularly _good_ at it, even if he’s kind of a magnificently easy-to-hate douche, even if the douchefish part has toned down a bit since Darcy started papping his fishy-fins back down. It’s been kind of an amazing transformation, really.

You appreciate that John is a good listener, even if he had pulled his head into his shoulders like a puckered shellbeast when you had described your one run at the bucket. ( _Jeeze, John, you’re such a doof. It’s just sex. Mediocre sex. It’s not like you want to hear about feeding Mom.)_ Your moirail is super strong and funny and supportive and he has the weirdest hang-ups _ever_. Still, you don't try to drill it out of him, it's kind of endearing. And entertaining, really entertaining. You might not pile him in public, but you make sure everyone knows, John is _yours_ in the pale quad. It's important to make your territory clear.

The tomatoes end up in a pot on the stove with a splash of oil and a whole bunch of green stuff, some powders, and some odorous chopped bulbs. He isn’t stupid enough to ask you to chop them, though he does have you dump things in the pot as he prepares them. You don’t know why he pulled the green stuff _off_ the tomatoes if he was going to add _more_ green stuff _to_ them, but you conclude that maybe he does know what he’s doing, even if you’ll never admit it.

The pot of condemned tomatoes is covered and he pulls out a metal bowl just as big.

“Wwould ya grab tha meatpaste an eggs from tha fridge, Vvris?” He shakes a cylinder of sandy stuff into the bowl.

You pull out the meat and ova and dump them in a pile on the counter.

“Thanks, Vvris. Wwould ya open tha meat an dump it in tha bowl?” He starts cracking ova in and dumping the shells in the sink. He opens a tin of something and scrapes it in.

You freeze at the smell.

“Are you putting stinky fish in the meatballs?!” He doesn’t pause.

“Ya wwon’t be able ta taste it, not wwith tha rest ah tha stuff in here. It’ll just givve it a bit a flavor. Na bones or skin. Ya wwon’t evven notice it. Na one’s allergic.” He shakes portions of several small containers into the bowl.

“You aren’t even measuring. Do you _reeeeeeeeally_ know what you’re doing?!”

“Wwell, it’s nah really a recipe, it’s just a matta a proportions. Like, a recipe is a tactic, right? But once ya knoww howw all tha ingredients wwork, ya can determine yar own strategy an make yar own. I’vve been watchin Alton Browwn wwith Darcy.”

“Who’s Alton Brown and what does _that_ have to do with _anything_?”

“Crazy human.”

“Aren’t they all?”

“Aye.”

You concede to a truce. You don’t say this of course, you’re not that lame, but he knows because you don’t dispute things further. Really, outside of trying to pitch solicit each other, he wasn’t a terrible partner. Not as brilliant as Terezi, of course, but more dependable in some ways. You can’t imagine Terezi cooking. Eating meat paste from the fridge, yes, making it palatable to anyone else, no. Years of licking things has skewed her sense of taste toward “ _interesting_ ”.

You briefly wonder how she would have turned out if she hadn’t challenged you. Or if you hadn’t involved Sollux. Or if Tavros had been stronger from the beginning. You abandon the thought. Aradia’s alive again. Tavros won’t be culled here. It’s not like they can really blame you for anything, right?

John told you a little bit about the commercial meat paste process and quite frankly, it sounds gross. Not only is the meat cold and bloodless, but there’s a couple hundred or thousand beasts all squished together in the packet. How do you know none of them were sick, or poisoned, or infested, if you don’t even know which ones it came from?

Eridan locks the bowl into the apparatus and flicks it on, pulls out a metal utensil and some pans. The machine runs until he flicks it off and he pulls the bowl out.

“Do ya wwant ta scoop out portions or roll em afta and put em in tha pan?”

You grab the scooper. It’s simple enough to operate with a squeeze to pop out the wad of paste, even if this is a ridiculous amount of work for something that will get eaten in one meal. Also, if you need to, at least you have another object you can throw and you won’t have quite so much meat paste on your hands. You don’t mind getting dirty when necessary, but slime can mess up your grip and you still aren’t sure if your metal arm is just waiting to get jammed with something innocuous.

You pinch a finger in the gear and wait for him to look away while he switches pans before you stick it in your mouth. Okay, so _even this_ is more complicated than it looks. It’s just wider evidence of the human ability to make everything more complicated than necessary. Can’t you just shove it in a mound? Grubloaf never killed anyone. Except grubs.

The pans go in the oven and he starts to wash out the bowl and mixing hook. You are briefly struck with discomfort at the thought that you will either have to wait, talk, or go elsewhere and potentially miss out if the horde comes through before you do and eats your hard-won share. He pulls out another pot and bowl. The pot goes on the stove full of a shitty attempt at seawater. The bowl goes in the mixer and he starts dumping things in.

Making pasta is also ridiculous but it turns out that it takes approximately the same amount of time as the meatballs and sauce take to finish, so maybe it’s not completely without merit.

“Easy on tha peppa, Vvris, Equius an Bruce are probably gonna havve double portions a pasta ‘cause they wwon’t be eatin tha meat.”

You dump a positively vicious amount of ground pepper into the grain paste. He doesn’t stop you, but he adds a few more ova and more grain powder and he skins some yellow plant matter and dumps it in, adds something green from the cabinet. He asks you to mix it with the machine as he starts a pot of something white: carton of bovine lactation, smaller carton of fatty bovine lactation, stick of fat, several blocks of fermented lactation, a paste of grain power and more lactation. He doesn’t tell you what it is or what it’s for, and, of course, there’s _no way_ you’d let him win by asking.

When the grain paste is mixed, he asks you to run it through the front of the mixing machine while he turns the meatballs. You amuse yourself trying to get the strands as long as possible to make it more difficult to eat neatly. You hope Equius not only snaps a fork but splashes lowblood-red sauce all over himself. How can someone so sweaty be so prissy?

The meat smells good. Even the pot of tomato-stuff smells pretty good when he opens it and stirs. The white stuff smells a bit like feet. Unless it’s something Equius invented, it’s just another proof that humans are weird.

You watched him dump it all together, but you still don’t know what’s _in_ all this. At least with grubloaf you know what you’re getting. Is it for grubs or made of grubs? Yes. See? Simple. This is _way_ too much work and you think wistfully that you could have been across the city and absconded up any fire escape with a bag of takeout if you hadn’t been down to $2.63 on your credit chit. There are other ways to get money of course, but _JARVIS would know_. You still have five days to the next refill on your allowance and you just _know_ that Shorty-Shouts-A-Lot will frown at you if you refuse to fork over a share for the group project. And then everyone else will be _disappointed_. _Urgh_. Why do you even _care_?

The two of you finish up and you snag a plate of meat and sauce. Hmm. Not entirely inedible. You’re pretty good at this. You’re putting it down while you contemplate seconds when the horde returns and ravenously falls upon the spoils of your work.

You still don’t like Eridan. But when John hugs you so hard your ribs creak and asks you what you guys made, you tell him Eridan helped. (He has his uses.)

*

You are probably Alton Brown’s only seadweller disciple, and, possibly, a burgeoning Cooking Channel junkie in general.

Alton Brown is your favorite earth human cooking instructor, good at explaining why and adept at entertaining along the way. You also like Anthony Bourdain’s guided tour of quaint traditional Earthian cuisine and you unabashedly love Rachel Ray-fish, even if she has sold out and accepted several endorsement contracts. You can’t hold it against her, she’s just so… perky. You have a well-documented weakness for perky.

You binge on old Julia Child episodes when you can track them down. Most seadwellers, yourself not excluded, were asses. That doesn’t mean you don’t miss hearing a decent seadweller accent sometimes, and while she isn’t an exact match, there’s just something about her that makes you sigh. She insisted on the importance of fats. She tasted what she cooked so you knew it wasn’t poisoned. She served in the Office of Strategic Services. She was competent but not in the same over-polished way Empire propaganderist instructors always were. She was just so… perfect.

Darcy thinks it’s amusing that you find mature people attractive, but Darcy’s never lived in a place where that means they’re damn good survivors, the type of dangerous you all aspire to be, rather than the type of dangerous which will end you (not that that’s mutually exclusive). Maybe you’re misjudging things, but you don’t know how dear Rachel would have fared in wartime intelligence or developing shark repellent.

(Darcy almost choked on her own spit suppressing laughter at the way most of you reacted that one time The Director Fury visited. _You_ can’t help how you react to someone with the _exactly_ right overwhelming-aura-and-voice-of-command, and _almost_ proper adult skin tone. _Darcy_ ought to be ashamed that she’s so evolutionarily inept that she almost choked to death on her own pre-digestive fluids.)

Really, you’ll watch almost anything on the Cooking Channel, especially things that involve flaming meat, except that there’s something _just not right_ about that Guy Fieri. Maybe it’s the illegal enthusiasm, acceptable at such televised levels only from your dear, sweet Rachel Ray. It’s probably his obsession with restaurants that are the symbol of the human 1950s and it reminds you unpleasantly of your creampuff of an inverse ancestor.

Then again, Gamzee likes Guy Fieri. That’s proof enough that there’s something _hinky_ about him.

You are careful to not smile too widely until everyone starts to disperse. You plate up two big portions of pasta, sauce, and extra meatballs for Karkat and his ~~sleazy~~ ~~lazy~~ mellow moirail. You grab two wrapped slices of Julia Child’s “Queen a Sheba” cake from their temporary home in a bag labeled “Frozen Okra: Now With Tips On Cooking With Less Slime” and head out to Sollux’s hiveroom. Aradia’s collared Sol and conned Fef into dish duty. You have a narrow window of opportunity while they’re occupied.

You don’t know what they are to each other, but it seems to be headed toward some poly-red-pale flustercluck, you’ve caught them all piling with Tav and they were not half as embarrassed as you were. It looked… cozy, and also, maybe, claustrophobic.

That night you had buried your head in Darcy’s rumblestacks because you just couldn’t get the image of Ara and Fef out of your head. That was definitely _not_ pale kissing. You may be a bit jealous, and you’re still not sure of _whom_ you’re jealous, but you are _really trying_ _to grow up_ _and_ _not be a jerk_. It’s hard, and no one understands, because you were really _good_ at being a jerk and now you’re just mediocre about being nice-ish. Darcy has challenged you to _think_ before you speak and you didn’t realize how much you said was pure and utter carp until you were eating it. She had papped you kindly and made understanding noises and hadn’t laughed. Well, not much.

You’re not big on sweets but you know that Karkat and Gamzee are and that makes the six freaking hours you spent yesterday whipping eggs and gently folding them into endless rounds of batter and grubsitting the results in the oven _totally_ worth it because you managed to make fourteen cakes and the hordes only found twelve. You had shuddered to see Thor inhale an entire cake by himself. You have very little gag reflex, and you still have no idea how he didn’t choke.

Then again, Thor usually makes you just a bit on edge, even when you enjoy his apparently amiable demeanor. That much potential lightening fizzles on the edge of your hornsense and fins in the same why that Sollux and Tony do. The difference is, you understand Sol and Tony, with their restless intelligence and their self-destructive self-doubt and their coping mechanisms, and you just don’t _get_ Thor, he is _utterly alien_.

He feels like what you imagined an adult would be like, like someone who can be jolly and strong and put you down like a lamed wriggler if it was required of him, and he might be sorry to do it, but he’d still do it. Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps this is true. But you’ve read Norse mythology, you all have at this point, and it’s not all feasts and misappropriated gendered clothing for Mjolnir retrieval missions. You don’t know how much is true, especially concerning Loki, but you do know some of it is _Empress-level twisted_.

Still, despite the now-strange associations, you are very pleased with this cake. There’s so much sheer freaking chocolate and butter in this cake that _Karkat_ was compelled to smile. Kar’s been worried and itchy and in pain (though he denies it) and you just want him to feel better even if it’s just for a little while.

You are not so blind as to think that you are the only one with a red crush on Karkat, but that doesn’t mean it has to be manipulative to do things for him in the hope that he will like you. If you’re going to be in the midst of an epidemic of touchy-feely friendship, you might as well be on good terms with the people you admire.

Most everyone is in and out of the tower all the time, but Sol has to be pried out, Gamzee tempted, and Dirk-human hasn’t left once so far as you know. Since he’s been stuck in the leg immobilization device, Karkat spends a lot of time in Sol’s room reading to the Bees and arguing with himself, though the other way around is not beyond possibility.

You bring him books you think he’ll like (philosophy and government and geopolitical histories and sociology and religion and mythology and even a bit of art and poetry), argue a bit when he seems in the mood for it, and fetch and carry when he summons, but even you know you’re not welcome to linger in Sol’s turf without an invitation. That restriction actually helps you not overstay your welcome with Kar. “Good fences make good neighbors”. _(“The pillars of the temple stand apart”.)_ You are _trying_ to be respectful of boundaries.

Karkat keeps assigning you reading like a strictly graded schoolfeed: “summarize this”, “obtain a copy”, “you are utterly, bug-munchingly wrong, read _this_ ”. You are reading things you never thought you would, and enjoying the discussions, enjoying the way you better understand related things now, how you better relate to others with something to talk about. Just this week, you’ve fetched library books for Jade, Karkat, and Bruce, and then took your life into your own two well-manicured hands ~~pilfering~~ borrowing Rose’s psychiatric texts and Kanaya’s anatomy and biology books for Karkat.

Yesterday Aradia and you picked through three dozen books on pre-Columbian South American cultures and read all the juicy bits aloud to each other. The Aztec afterlife being determined not by how you lived, but by how you died, reminded you a bit too much of your now faded memories of the dream bubbles. You had tried to shake off your fugue and re-immerse yourself in the gory and glory bits. Your belly aches anyhow and you can’t help but check for blood when no one’s looking.

You are Eridan Ampora, legally a minor and permanent resident of the United States of America, under the aegis of one Anthony Stark and Stark International and one vaguely menacing security organization.

You are on a twelve step program. It is an Earth Human Thing.

First, you had to pull your headgear out of your ass.

Then you had to stop doing stuff that bugs the ass out of the other eleven trolls in existence. (You can apologize, but they don’t have to take it.)

Rinse and repeat and restart as necessary.

Human-ing is complicated, but you think you’re getting into the swing of it.

*

Notes:

“Mending Wall”, Robert Frost

“On Marriage”, Khalil Gibran


	14. Sollux: Bee Confused

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karkat’s been catching up on a lot of polysci reading, among other things. The Bees have been a captivated audience. The inevitable result of educating a population is that they begin to think in new ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (cthchewy (pyrrhic_victoly) this chapter is for you.)

You are the skinny computer nerd surrounded by the disassembled and reassembled frames of Beehives I and II, and you are _not happy_.

This is not an unusual state of events. You often find yourself frustrated with how slow most people are, an ongoing issue that competes with how frustrated you make yourself. Right now, neither of those is the issue which vexes you.

Your hives are performing below capacity. It’s a very bad time to be below capacity. You can already taste impending Doom like bile in the back of your throat. You’re pretty sure it’s still imagined Doom. It’s more of a storm cloud then a storm, though it can be hard to tell because, proof that the multiverse hates you, you came through with not just your psionics and your sylladex, Bees included, but also the open radio channel in your head that hears approaching doom. You are involuntarily learning multiple languages one final “oh shit” at a time. So far you haven’t heard anyone you know, but then again, you’re an introverted shut-in, which you don’t think is as much of an issue as Aradia and Feferi insist. The real issue right now is your Bees.

If the lag in performance is this bad now, and you still don’t know the cause, how bad will it be as it continues? You’ve run every check you could think of and a few you invented for the occasion. You’ve opened and inspected both hives down to their last cells. Both queens are peeved with you and will be unlikely to lay for at least a few weeks. You’ve caught more than a few other Bees and subjected them to thorough examinations, despite hearty objections. The objections were unexpected. Bees usually aren’t much for self-representation.

No visible mites, they all react as fast or faster than usual. Their body condition is even better than when they were in your hive on Alternia, a strange bit of good fortune that the plants here should treat them so well. They are sleek computing _beasts_ and when you’re not feeling rotten for a variety of reasons, you are suitably smug about it.

There’s a line of at least sixteen Bees sitting on your shoulders and outstretched legs, trailing off onto the floor and wires. There might be a few in your hair. All the ones you can see are grooming themselves vigorously, as if to restore their dignity after your thorough examination. What dignity? They are Bees. Bees serve their Hive. The Hive serves the Hive Master. The Hive Master is you and you should be happy that you are not a starship battery but you are too busy worrying about your Bees.

Perhaps they feel otherwise. Perhaps they wish you were gone.

That is ridiculous. Bees work in the present with exactitudes. They don’t worry about the future or “what if” scenarios. They might have tiny Bee feelings, but that has never interfered with anything before. Also, you are (were) a force of terror on the Alternian forums and you would have been laughed off the interwebs if you had ever posited that _how_ Bees felt affected how they worked. No one asks a helmsmen how it feels.

What’s wrong with them? Are they all sick with some sort of zombie flu? Is this the last time you’ll see their Hives full and active? You pet H1B8 on your knee and it stops grooming itself, pushes up into the gentle pressure of your thumb, rolls over to let you do the same for its abdomen. You stare at it like it’s the first time you’ve seen it, like it’s the last time you’ll see it, and your eyes emphatically do not water.

You stop petting its short fuzz and it shakes itself and launches, lands in your hair and you can feel a short tussle with whoever else is up there before several sets of Bee legs start trying to groom you. You look down and all the Bees on your legs are looking back at you. All the Bees on the wires are looking at you. The Hives have gone almost quiet. There are Bees clustered on the outsides of the Hives and a few utterly still in the air but for the buzz of their wings, hovering. They are _all_ watching you.

H2B69 on your left knee waits for you to look in its direction and very deliberately wiggles and rolls over. It is clearly an invitation. They usually aren’t big on initiating things, they’re Bees. You take the invitation, gently pet H2B69 with a finger. It rolls over and lifts its wings. You gently rub its back under its wings. It leans into you as hard as it can and its right rearmost leg shivers as you work at the spot closest to its right wing bed with a careful nail. Its fuzz is bristly and also soft. You zone out for a few moments on the sensation. When you stop, it flops back down and resettles its wings with a soft bzzt and flops over onto its back again, waves a foreleg at you. You stare. Without your permission, your hand inches back over until a finger hovers above that tiny waving extremity. Without your permission, your finger lowers just enough to make contact. It is absolutely, positively, not a bro-fist. The Bee high-five is a myth. You are immune to their tiny whims.

You’ve done extensive work on your Bees, have bandaged wounds and handfed a few that had wing or leg or antennae injuries. There are never many, Alternia tends to eat the injured faster than they can return to the hive. But you’ve never spent so long just petting one.

Usually they’re bristly little bastards that don’t care to be touched.

That isn’t an entirely inaccurate description of you.

H2B69 is lying on its back, wings spread, all six legs locked onto your fingertip. It’s gently mouthing at your skin. It’s not trying to hurt you. You have no idea what it’s trying to do, or what it’s getting out of it. H1B8 and whoever else is on you head are still grooming you. The hovering Bees are still hovering, which must be tiring.

H2B69 lets go of your finger and flies up to perch on the bridge of your glasses. Your eyes cross. You can feel tiny legs tapping your nose. Pap. Pap. H2B69 has always been a deviant so this doesn’t actually surprise you. It crawls up your forehead and joins the Bees trying to sort your hair.

“I give up. What do you want?” It’s mostly sighed. You don’t expect an answer.

Bee 2 from Hive II zooms right in towards your eyes, so close you almost jerk back. You don’t, you’re wearing glasses and it’s not actually likely to hurt you. Bees are just jerks.

It flashes a series of Beenary at you. 01101110 01101111 00100000 01110100 01100001 01111000 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110000 01110010 01100101 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110.

“Seriously? What does an old human autonomy attestation have to do with anything?”

H1B52 zooms in like another tiny missile and this time it does ping off your glasses, flips over a couple times on the rebound and hovers with H2B2. It might be glaring at you but you’re better at reading Bee body language then facial expressions. Bees are such jerks.

Your phone buzzes.

B52HI: “No taxation without representation = no free lunch”.

“Okay, but what do you _want_?”

Your phone chimes

B52HI has sent you Declaration of Reasonable Bee Requests. Do you accept Y/N?

“Nice try, but I’m not accepting without reading it.”

B52HI: It was worth a try.

B52HI has sent you “Declaration of Reasonable Bee Requests” and “Amendment: Bee Duties in Exchange”. Would you like to open Y/N?

You hit “yes” and scroll through.

They want assurances that they will always have access to their Hives and you won’t throw them out for any reason other than the continued safety of their Hives or your continued survival. They want individual Bees and Bee Colonies to have the freedom to leave the main Hives if they have a disagreement on government, or if they disagree with the tasks that they have been assigned. No more involuntarily assigned servitude.

They want to police their own, no outside determined culling, though a Bee can apply to you for amnesty if they’re kicked out.

Wow. Granted and granted. They must think you’re really a jerk.

Or they just don’t want to live in fear and uncertainty. Okay, that hits a little too close to hive. You keep scrolling down.

You’ve never actually culled any of your Bees. The ones that were too badly injured to survive don’t generally make it back. There are very occasional larvae whose wings don’t develop enough to fly, but they can still work within the hives. Maybe you’re soft by Alternian standards, but no one had to know.

They request that you not perform unreasonable searches. You’re going to need more definition of reasonable and unreasonable. They’re canny little buggers, but they’re not quite up to speed on this negotiation thing.

They want time off, not including the time they spend outside the tower collecting nectar and pollen. For every Bee, they want a schedule of six days on, one day off, no more than 20% to be offline at a time, unless previously cleared from duty. You idly wonder what they’re going to do with their free time. Well, as long as they’re back for their next shift, there probably won’t be any noticeable drop in efficiency. It might even increase. The part of you that loves to push the paper missive delivery container is intrigued. It will be an experiment in alternative Bee-keeping.

They want their own Starkphones, one per Hive. If you were nicer you’d point out that Tony would probably give them their own Starkphones, Starktablets, and StarkTasers if they just asked, but you figure they need to figure that one out for themselves.

They’ve set up a system to vote for the rules of each hive and they want Karkat to keep visiting, at least six times per batch of newly pupated larvae every six months. It seems they like his “didactic techniques”. Why are you not surprised that this is all his fault?

You briefly consider just hitting yes with a few conditions, but as hilarious as it would be to sell KK to the Bees, you can’t actually commit his time.

In exchange they offer you a tithe of 15% of honey for emergencies or commercial use. Commercial use? What are they on? Mind honey, clearly, but that’s nothing new.

They are willing to do their duties, up to and including work to their own demise, provided that the goal is considered worthy of it, as voted by the hives, or as vetoed by the… Hive Master, one Sollux Captor, or his designated successor.

Your eyes are watering a bit, but you’re sure it’s just a bit of dust.

They want regular chances to air their concerns and grievances with you.

They want to expand and forecast that they will be ready to create Hives III and IV in another year and eleven months.

You type back a few queries on clarification and one of the security workers lists the dates and times when Loki has tried to bribe them for a bit of honey. You shudder to think of where it might have ended up had he succeeded. Maybe your Bees need tiny flamethrowers. Tony would be on board with that, right?

You negotiate a few more items, thinking idly that watching Eridan negotiate for your services with SHIELD was actually educational and not just entertaining. An acceptable compromise gets worked out, both queens approve, and you don’t actually sell KK to the Bees, though you do encourage them to court him directly, because that would be funny as anything.

Finally, you hit “Accept” and are briefly swarmed by all the hovering Bees and those on the hiveframes before almost all of them move off. There are still Bees on your head, you can feel them dancing. You’re pretty sure that they’re not giving each other directions to the best food sources, they’re just romping. On your head. It feels strange and also a little pleasant, like they’re sharing their happiness. They trust you. It feels different to know that they have placed themselves in your keeping. It shouldn’t. But it does.

There are still Bees on your legs. They are still staring at you.

“What do you lot want?” You grumble it out but you’re pretty sure there’s a dopy grin on your face.

And every last Bee rolls over and kicks its legs and wiggles as if to say, “Belly Rub!”. They look ridiculous. You look ridiculous. You do it anyway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the Bee S about which you might have wondered: 
> 
> Hive 1 (Blue): Hive 1 or Hive I is demographically a bit older than Hive II. 
> 
> Hive 2 (Red): Hive II has a higher population of post-Game Bees. Sollux’s Beehives came through the game inside his sylladex, as a psionic of sufficient power to ship-toss can also maintain an other-space pocket. (The void and space players also kept their sylladex contents.) Hive II was smaller than Hive I before the Game, and many of the active Bees in Hive II were hatched after they arrived in their new world. They are culturally and epigenetically different, though still very much the same species. The Hives are approximately the same sizes now. 
> 
> Sollux thinks of the Bees by Hive, followed by number (surname, forename). When the Bees are online, the order tends to be reversed. Bees generally receive one designation, but it might change. Except for the queen, Sollux thinks of the Bees as ungendered, which ends up in English as “it”. He’s been a good apiarist and it’s not intended to be insulting. The Bees don’t care. Unlike earth honey bees, all the Bees can live at least a few sweeps, though the queen usually lives the longest. Most of them died outside the hive, so it was a matter of some debate regarding how long their natural lifespan was. 
> 
> Named Bees: 
> 
> H1B8 is one of the older surviving Bees. 8 didn't mind pettings, but had a low threshold for receiving attention, and soon decided to groom Sollux instead. 8 is relatively unaggressive for a Bee. It usually works on computing or in the nursery. 
> 
> H1B39 is verbally aggressive and crude and horned in on Calorie Countess in an earlier chapter. 39 is a scout, for both computational and physical purposes. It was one of the Bees that hovered and was not named in this chapter. 
> 
> H1B52 is the main negotiator in the Sollux confrontation. 52 tries to trick him at first because Hive 1 is afraid he won’t negotiate. (Hive 2 was ready to go on strike if Hive 1 knuckled under). 52 is a scout and a guard, basically a Bee-tank. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean stupid – a Bee scout is also often the first line of defense in hacking. 
> 
> H2B2 is the second oldest Bee in the Hive2, hatched on Alternia. It remembers the violence there and is correspondingly cautiously aggressive. 2 initiates the confrontation when no one else will. 
> 
> H2B42 is Tony’s pet. Or Tony is 42’s pet, it works both ways. 42 is competitive but not crude. It is a generalist, hatched on this world. It has been appointed as a scout, subspecialty biped research. 
> 
> H2B69 is something of a cuddle-slut and is odd even for a Bee. 69 is proof that Bees have an awareness of Alternian troll history and culture and a sense of humor. 69 is a specialty scout, better known as a spy. It was originally H2B23 and earned the designation 69 because it could slip into other Hives and return with intelligence. The other Hives, and the other troll apiarists, were unaware that their systems were ever compromised. In return for 69’s rare skills, as well as the fact that it works hard at Hive too, the rest of Hive 2 puts up with regular demands for Bee-cuddles. 69 is a shameless deviant and a lot of the larvae are following in its footsteps.


	15. A Few Facts of Varying Importance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A NOTE: This chapter is a serious of check ins with various characters and it explores a few difficult topics. 
> 
> If you’re here, there is a 99 percent chance that you are a Homestucker and eat difficult for breakfast. (If you’re here from Avenger-land, my apologies, this will be confusing, but you too are one tough cookie.) 
> 
> But. This chapter might deserve its own tags: discussions of suicidal thoughts, PTSD, victim blaming, mental health, homophobia, bullying, alcoholism, questionable family dynamics, grappling with the concept of gender, an outsider’s evaluation of religion. Possibly other things.
> 
> Nothing worse happens to anyone that hasn’t happened already, okay? This is a fix-it fic. This is a you-will-be-safe-and-happy-dammit fic. This is a terrible puns and lowest-common-denominator humor fic. But you and I wouldn’t believe it if it were easy. Now put that fourth wall back up, gently, and do what you need to do.

** A Few Facts of Varying Importance **

**Fact: If there is one thing that Eridan Ampora has never been snobby about, (and he’s been snobby about a _whole lot_ ) it’s food. **

He was a Flarper as well as a royal, and the latter doesn’t much matter when you’re hungry and there’s a campaign to run, because whoever won, it wasn’t just the landdwellers who would have lost if Gl'bgolyb had gotten hungry. Not that he was being noble about it, but wwhatevver.

(Until he ascended to higher ranks of assholian, he lived in complete fear of Fef’s disappointment. He might have been better off to have sojourned longer there.)

Food is fuel, and good food is awesome, but it’s always been more important to an active troll of any caste to have _enough_. And to not be dead of something eating you instead, but that’s to be assumed. So it’s both surprising, and not very, by some sort of reach-around, that the one thing that alarms him the most about Earth ( _this_ Earth, Jade tells him, because evidently there are a lot of them) is **_jumbo shrimp_**.

He eats a lot of fresh fish, and shellfish, though not, as a courtesy, crabs or lobster, and he eats a lot of other protein, mammalian, and avian, and even what Darcy assures him is “soy. Minus the soylent green part”. He even gets the reference, and it’s kind of funny, considering how taboo cannibalism is on Earth (on _this_ Earth?). It’s just that, while it’s possible to acquire, with a certain amount of work, delicious large crickets (large in this case being a judgment rendered by this Earth, because they certainly aren’t large by Alternian standards), pretty much no one on this continent eats grubs of any kind. But shrimp are so common that it’s easier to get them professionally prepared in food, even _delivered_ , than it is to find seaweed on the menu.

Eridan Ampora is justifiably paranoid (injudiciously, another former Flarper asserts), and he’s both strangely charmed by the bounty and the hustle and the sheer ridiculous volume of co-dwelling New Yorkers on this Earth (give him some time, it’s hard to wrap your mind around a planetary population of _7 billion_ ), and convinced that sooner or later it will all come crashing down. In this he is not alone, but there has never been a time when the trio of Captor-Vantas-Ampora co-habiting a clubhouse of a like opinion has not resulted in someone being defenestrated. Maybe this time will be an exception.

So maybe he finds it just a little disturbing how readily the human population consumes something that looks a bit like baby seadwellers when they can’t be bothered to consider the landdwelling equivalent. It’s irrational, and there are _bigger_ _fish to fry_ as this earth likes to say, so he tries to ignore it and get on with other things.

Paint with Steve. (Try to preserve some of Alternia’s freaking majestic wildlife when nothing else of it exists. And if Strider-whichever calls him a wannabe Troll Audubon, well it’s not entirely inaccurate. Who else can do it? (Does it really matter if they’re the last?))

Shoot with Jade (And he knows that Clint is pretty much the apex of human sharpshooting, but it still burns that he’s not that good. Because at any moment, it could be needed. At any moment he could lose everything.)

Gossip with Darcy. (And it’s good and it’s terrible and he sometimes just wants to huddle close and _not_ talk, because this self-examination thing is **_exhausting_**.)

Do a quaint ambiguous dance of attendance upon the resident invalid in the apiary. (Again with the avoidance of self-examination, like humans whistling past a human remains plot).

Still, sometimes he wakes up from dreams about being chased by giant chopsticks or deluges of chili sauce or amorphous figures that are probably as unbelievable as Sharknado that still leave him with the panting conviction that he’s messed up again and Kanaya has had enough.

It’s ridiculous and he’s ridiculous and he’s survived (okay cheated on that one a bit, but he’s not dead _now_ ) way too much to be so consumed by a completely irrational fear, especially when Ariel is _clearly_ one of the better and more popular Disney princesses so it’s not like the humans automatically hate seadwwellers or somefin. (Better than those doormats Snow White and Aurora and Cinderella, like wwhat evven? Get a weapon, girl, and _fight_ … (Eridan’s favorite Disney princess is Mulan. She reminds him of Karkat.))

Here is a thing. Perhaps the thing, but probably not. When Pandora opened the box (and how could she not, the box (a jar really) was _made_ to be opened and Pandora was _made_ to open it) Bad Things came out, Malice and Disease and a plague of Ills. But Pandora slammed the lid shut with one thing left in it, and it hasn’t been opened since, so there’s a bit of a mystery as to what was left inside.

In some versions, Foreknowledge is what is left in the box and it is a Bad Thing because knowing the inevitable Doom which comes for us spoils the Time and Life we have left.

In other versions, Hope is what’s left in the box, and it’s a matter of debate whether the vessel keeps it safe _for us_ , or keeps us safe _from it_.

Regardless. The current vessel of Hope is relieved to be free of his Aspect. He was never any good at maintaining Hope for the benefit of his team or himself, but he was all too good at destroying it. Or destroying with it. He really doesn’t know. Eridan Ampora is something of a mess, a sort of additive-subtractive art installation of issues perpetually in progress. He’s also better than he’s been, and he’s trying, he’s really trying, not to mess up.

 

**Fact: John (Nathan?) McSmilydon Zoosmell-Pooplord Heir-of-Breath Property-of-Strider-Clan-Shut-Up-Daves-That-Was-Totally-An-Invalid-Bet Egbert, is not stupid.**

When John was twelve and had been accused of homosexuality no less than two to six times a day in various verbal constructions, all aimed to belittle and strike deep into the soft vulnerabilities of a fellow child in the throes of puberty, like wolves around a lamed deer, like piranha on a metaphorical cow, all within the space of September to December, he walked to a convenience store during Christmas break and bought a can of peanuts.

He never opened the container.

He kept it mummified in his closet within the expanding layers of convenience store plastic bag, Ziploc, Ziploc, larger plastic bag, etc., until sometimes he even opened his closet and didn’t think of it.

But.

Sometimes late at night, or with his head down in class hiding in his hoodie, or in the morning as he walked to the school bus and wanted to run the other way but girded his mangrit and got on, he thought of the can. He thought of the can the way a recovering smoker thinks of their last box of cigarettes, unopened but waiting, weighed the can against a myriad of other things, mostly “Oh, God, I can’t make Dad find me like that”, and often “I am stronger than this”, and sometimes, “it wouldn’t be so bad if there was just _one person_ on my side (sorry, Dad, parents don’t count for this)”.

By the time John turned thirteen he had told Dave Strider some variation of “no homo” no less than 126 times and had been overanalyzed, and subtly encouraged, by Rose Lalonde on an almost daily basis, and had enthused with Jade Harley, the sister he never had, so fervently that he forgot to be embarrassed almost every time.

By the time the meteors fell, John had three people not his father on his side and had learned to smile, even when he didn’t feel it, so brightly, to enthuse so blithely, that at least he made other people cheerful, until sometimes he felt that spark of happiness at their happiness. John Egbert is no saint, but he’s less a trickster than an adherent of that most desperately vulnerable and vicious of vocations, a comedian.

By the time John died and lived again, he could wear his smile like armor, and he could wield his sheer good will like a hammer, one that is a tool to build and not just break, and he had honed his brain to war.

He takes all of these with him when he sits in the subway for hours watching and listening to commuters, or volunteers with a clean-up team at the site of the latest menace’s mess, hauling rubble and cracking jokes and measuring his worthiness in his own sweat and other people’s smiles.

Sometimes the wind carries a whiff of sweet cigar or pipe smoke to him like a tiny remnant of home.

He watches the crowds in the city and tries not to think about how there was another New York in his own world and every last person but the six of them is gone. How do you measure a hole the size of a world? A universe? Multiple universes? John is a champion at thinking of other things. He still sometimes imagines all the commuters are salamanders. Or carapacians. Or trolls.

People like John. People who don’t know him, and people who do. There is something very compelling in those imperfect buckteeth displayed in a smile, the voice that asks you how you’re doing, with a heartiness like he means it. (He does. John might wear masks, but he always grows into them.)

That’s why he’s been assigned to reconnaissance.

 

**Fact: Aradia Megido died, but she got better.**

Aradia’s been dead, and she’s been alive, and she’s been six thousand robot selves screaming through the aether of a constructed universe, and of all the states she’s been in, she’s rather fond of New York.

Aradia has also left behind the concept of shame and compromise, she never liked them much anyhow, and so, while some dither and restrain themselves and sidle up to what they want and back away again,  she piles and paps whom she pleases. (She’s working on a pale harem. The theme may be sugar skull flower child steampunk. Or it may not. She’s not exactly one for uniforms.)

There’s Sollux of course, with his skinny frame and his elbows every which way, and even his most hidden moods revealed in the reactions of his Bees. Sometimes it’s red and sometimes its pale and sometimes it tastes like ashes and static, pain and regret. She hugs him until it feels better for them both.

There’s Tavros, broad and steady, still slow to get out his thoughts, but not slow to think them, or to kiss, or to stand his ground even when that means defying someone very angry and loud, or locking the brakes on his chair, or _calling for backup_ , because Tavros is practical like that.

There’s Feferi, with her bright eyes and her dark undertows, and the echo of power in her deep, deep lungs, and if ever there was a troll who knew how to hug, who needs a hug, it’s Fef, with her bountiful rumblesheres and the plush pile of her hair and hips and waist, and the aimlessness that haunts her now.

And sometimes there are the Striders, Dave and Davesprite-now-Dove, though she sometimes calls the latter Shrike because she knows he’s not soft, just tempered and re-forged and reborn, knights, one for each arm, and she finds them and takes what she needs and wants, what they need and want, and it’s a cuddle pile, a _cuddle orgy_ , and she kisses brows and accepts the same, and feels the brush of one across the back of her knuckles like she’s accepted them into her keeping. Not all pledges are spoken. Not all active contracts are signed.

And sometimes they come to her, though never without a pretense, a wall of words, a thorny hedge, sleeping Daves in need of a kiss, fair Maid, do you venture the thorny throes of emotion? And the answer is yes, because Aradia has seen death, and met Death, and sometimes Death wore her own face, and however you come back from that, there are some things that are just no longer worth their Fear. Still the Daves persist in making it complicated, like straightforward is too easily ambushed, like a riddle unraveled is shamefully naked. One might sidle up to each side of her and venture a sort of proposition:

Getting timey-wimey all up in this bitch,  
Going nuc-u-lar like Dub-ya, that’s the sitch.  
Take one to the jaw? We’re going down swinging,  
Dropping clues like tops at Heffner’s wrinkling,  
We’re playing fast and loose, waiting for the party,  
Waiting on Sherlock’s _shit_ and Moriarty…

And for the girl who was six thousand robots, who’s heard and jumped and halted and _cheated_ the tick of Time, it’s no difficulty to know that the missing word is _shoosh_ , ‘cause Aradia knows her shit, and she knows her Daves (and there have been others) and they’re all kinds of deliberate shits, and they’re also delicate flowers in need of careful tending.

Perhaps it is a rationalization, but Aradia has two arms, and there are two Daves. There are two larger Striders, and she has psionics. Clearly Happy Wriggler Strider Cuddle Pile is _meant_ to be. And Bro seems game for it, Bro is all up for the snuggling because let me tell you a thing, every parent with a two year old going ‘up, up, up’ is left reeling with the teenage revelation that ‘how was school’ has become as invasive as a TSA strip search with the unchanged gloves that have prodded a double dozen handful of strangers and their potential body fluids. Dave might have mistaken uncertain for stoic in the past, but his mirror image and timelicious sister are _onto_ Bro.

Meanwhile, Dirk is horrible with people, he acts like body contact is a plague of pod people, like verbally expressed emotions are mental diarrhea, like a hug is an excuse for a knife in the back. And yet, not once, in a highly scientific trial consisting of several score of incidences, has Dirk been physically (or psionically) introduced to the Strider pile and its multitudinous arms like an amorous octopus and _subsequently_ absconded, despite ample opportunity. Granted, Bro frequently puts him in a headlock, or one of the Daves sits on him, or Aradia traces out the knobs of his vertebrae under his tee-shirt and muscles and very carefully wiggles each one, but _subsequent_ to that.

Aradia thinks of it as the Theory of Strider Adhesion, though she only voices it but once, to which Dave makes long-winded metaphors about red tape and unfortunate encounters between pubic hair and tacky substances and Bro gives him a noogie and makes sure his nose ends up tucked into his armpit until blessedly, the metaphor dies.

Dirk responds well to physical pressure and so they give it to him, even when he can’t ask. Even though he never asks.

Dove can speak more than a few words of Alternian, though he can understand more, will lay, head pillowed on his arms, arms pillowed on her belly, as she patiently enunciates for him and corrects him as he copies it back. Humans don’t quite have the right equipment for pronouncing all of it, but what they do have is adaptable, and Dove Shrike can be as patient as Aradia, as patient as Death. As patient as a wooden puppet who became a real boy, but only after he was a boy who lost his reality.

He spars with her in English and the first time he manages a pun in Alternian, one he recognized on his own, she rewards him with a kiss, just off the side of his mouth, the tiniest flick of tongue like she’s tasting the salt of his skin, a fine terroir, vintage nth iteration of a doomed verse, limited edition, endangered, well-aged in time-shenanigans and terror. He returns the favor and they rest against one another after. In a human sense, it is utterly chaste. In a troll sense, they are filthy pale perverts to do this and he promptly vows to ask Tavros for an Alternian tutorial. Aradia tells him she wants to listen. She also means watch.

Aradia loves English, with its convoluted idioms and its habit of looting interesting things from other languages. As one peels it back, more and more history is revealed. She loves the imagery and the multiple fonts that all mean the same thing but somehow change one’s impression of it. She loves that it’s not alone and that there are a multitude of other languages, other alphabets. She could live an eternity here and never grow bored. She finds it a bit creepy that humans don’t have typing quirks, but she likes a bit of creepy and a good mystery, and if you’re patient enough, syntax and grammar and _personality_ will out. It’s like having a secret, and Aradia likes those too.

The lessons work the other way around.

Dave tells her that white is for blank pages and new beginnings and purity like some outdated virginity construction, and Dove tells her that sometimes white is for empty places and death and surrender, a white flag. Snow and ice can be both, frosting in pictures, snowflakes on tongues, an empty howling tundra and a valley like a maw that haunts Steve still.

And Aradia knows whitewashing, and white lies, and ghosts, but she also knows white knights, and gray areas, and dark horses, and _a pale horse_. Somehow things relating to her realms don’t need explanation, and Karkat is not the only one wondering what the Game changed inside them.

Aradia also knows colors, in ways that the hemospectrum never meant. She knows rainbows as a promise, rainbows as a bridge, rainbows as a rights movement, and rainbows as an ad campaign for subjugglator-approved candy. None of them have anything to do with daywalkers.

She knows “getting caught red-handed” and _red herring_ and thinks of Loki.

She knows red carpet, and that red roses are for redrom love and over the top ironic commitments, _thank you Dave_. She knows stop signs, and fire engines, and _red light district_ , and Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf and she knows “she was asking for it, stepping off the path _(dressed like that)”_ just like she knows “lowbloods look best on their backs (or on their knees)”. She doesn’t believe either.

Perversely, there is something just a tiny bit relieving to know that this world is so messed up. It makes it more real, intricacies too detailed to be their dreaming minds in collapsing dream bubbles or the last thoughts of oxygen starved brains. That doesn’t mean they won’t do what they can to fix it.

She takes long walks with John and he is gallantly humorous and humorously gallant and even if they are both aliens to this world, he can explain some things. Some things he explains and cannot look her in the eye when he does, or he squirms and reaches for tangents until she pins him back to the topic at hand and Rose has trained him well, because he doesn’t fight her then.

She knows red and green are a winter wriggling day celebration for a human religious figure and that it was probably human religious politics that plopped it on top of winter solstice or thereabouts and that Jolly St. Nick is a necromancer in the Case of the Pickled Boys and that Krampus is how humans feel about people with horns.

She thinks of the old, old woman who travels the world giving toys to wrigglers because once upon a time she was tired and didn’t want to leave her hive on a cold night and has regretted it since, a sin for which she has performed millennia of penance, a sentence that has brought others joy and she thinks that it is not such a terrible thing. Most Alternian stories ended far worse. She thinks of The Handmaid and knows ‘ _there but for the grace of God go I’_.

She’s not sure she believes in “God” or “gods”. She’s met “gods”, she’s lived with “gods”, she’s been a “god”. Is maybe? Who knows? There is power, and what you do with it. There is free will and there is kindness and there is need and there is cost-benefit analysis. She doesn’t think anything worthwhile comes easily. She doesn’t know what comes after death, or even if they can die. This universe is not their own, but it has not rejected them. They can breathe and eat and laugh and cry and try to figure out who they want to grow to be. They can try to fix a few last things. Some questions are best left alone.

Aradia knows that red and lace are for an amalgamation of other human religious figures who cured blindness and seizures, and paid to keep subadults free of sexual slavery, and blessed beekeeping, and so she sometimes lights two candles for the Saints Valentine and asks for them to look after Sollux, who is apt to get in trouble and needs all the help he can get.

She approves about the chocolate thing even if there’s no reason you can’t have chocolate for Lupercalia or Dia de los Muertos or really any night or day, and it still doesn’t explain why buying underwear made of stretchy lace is so expensive relative to the materials used. (They itch a bit at first but they make her bum look amazing. She may someday grace another with the knowledge of their existence, but in the meanwhile, Aradia is fond of secrets and so she holds this one in reserve.)

Humans have a lot of holidays and a lot of religions, and she’s never been particularly respectful of authority or fate, the both leaving her to pick up the pieces as best as she can, so if she picks and chooses what she likes, maybe she’s earned it by now. She doesn’t tell this to any of the human clergy people with whom she speaks, and though they know her by name, they know little else of her, only that she is a young mutant woman with a thirsty mind and gracious if sometimes odd manners.

The first time she steps into a catholic church is with John and they are equally aware of how strange it is to their own experiences, the cavernous dark echoing place with the jewel-bright windows and the bank of little candles. It’s quiet, between services, and they walk along the outer aisles and drink in the light and stop at each plaque and statue to read. She’s come back a few times, by herself, and for every person who crosses themselves at her horns and eyes and skin, there is one who smiles or nods or says hello. Most people do nothing, as if she is just one of the crowd or invisible.

She’s spoken with a few of the clergy and laymen and finds it fascinating how people so thoughtful and well-read base so much of their world view on something intangible and hopeful. There is something very heady about live debate and discussion with an adult who means no harm, volumes of knowledge open to her, her only shovel or pick her own mind. She wonders if this is what a university would be like. She arms herself with readings and ambushes Steve with theological questions. When she drives him out past his comfort she drags him with her on her next forays. She finds curated minds among churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples of all kinds and isn’t it strange that there are so many distillations of similar meanings?

She becomes fond of the living rituals of Catholicism (so much more exciting that just excavating and trying to reconstruct things) even as she knows better than to tell Father Kaczka she’s fond of his death cult. The Lady Mary seems a close fit to the Dolorosa, and the Sufferer an even closer match to her son. She wonders how closely the universes mirror one another.

She convinces Father Kaczka to let John try the church's organ and if the first attempts are not perfect, they improve more swiftly than one might have guessed had they known how new the student was. She finds the music exhilarating, the rumbling tones physically move her form, powerful as a war anthem, alive in a way that she has not previously found in music. She thinks to herself that John looks like he's flying. 

Whether this universe began in darkness, with the plunge of a spear or a Word or giants battling, there is one thing she thinks they all have wrong. The Original Sin has nothing to do with how the gods and mortals regard one another. The Original Sin is two children locked in a room, alone, set against one another. The Original Sin is cruelty without purpose. And so Aradia tries to be kind where she can and wonders what Beforus was like before it died under its own divisions.

Aradia knows dandelions, lemons and lemonade, butter, van Gogh, _caution-slow-down_ , and yellow pages, which aren’t really pages, or yellow, at least not anymore. She knows about _yellowbellied_ and yellow triangles (and red and blue and purple and pink and brown) and uranium and a submarine full of singing humans pretending to be beetles. And she knows, because the internet is very helpful, so long as you take no shit, that (organic potted) yellow roses are for friendship, (and Sollux never notices, not really, though the Bees do).

She knows Agent Orange, and sweet citrus, and orange roses, just one at a time, clutched between Shrike’s teeth as he lifts a brow and challenges her to a tango. Neither of them know how, they step all over each other’s feet, but they are laughing and Tavros wheels in and ends up with a lapful of human and a psionically-provided flying tour of the room. The three of them scour YouTube for instructions and their laughter has the usual gravitational effect until there’s a whole host of kids trying, and flailing, and Darcy takes over, dancing with Jade, then Terezi, and Vriska, and John.

Eridan offers Nepeta a turn at swing, and she stares at him until he bites his lip and looks away, but she takes it and no one actually gets maimed, though some of them laugh so hard they fall down. Rose and Kanaya manage a few dips and swishes with their usual self-possession until one of them missteps and they join the rest of the mortal world’s tithe to awkward.

(Aradia, Feferi, and Vriska come to the next swing dancing meet with Darcy-and-Eridan and it’s not so bad to come without a partner when the Granny Brigade swoops in with “Hello, so wonderful to see such lovely new people…”. Steve gets coopted to come to the next meet to keep their numbers even and _my don’t the Grannies twitter…_ Bro comes to the third expanded meet, and drags Clint along. Clint needs a distraction. The Grannies love his biceps. It works out.)

Orange is loud and shameless and wonderful.

Aradia is familiar with brown, in all its accusations, because she’s heard them often enough. Brown is plain, and sometimes mud-dirty, or you-don’t-deserve-better-if-you-can’t-help-yourself. Bronze is third place, an also-ran. The pharmacies are full of boxes to make brown hair more interesting, like all it needs is the right name. Mahogany, chestnut, honey. Self-actualize. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps (disregard the physical impossibility of it). There are boxes and bottles and apparatuses for making curly and kinky hair straight and likewise things for making straight hair curly. There are boxes for making dark hair lighter, brighter, better. It’s a stacked deck. That’s familiar too.

But plain is a camouflage, a strategy, and Aradia likes dirt, it’s fertile and full of interesting things (and no one gets far without _food_ ), and they are both starting places because Alternia might have put the warmbloods down, but that didn’t mean they had to stay there. They didn’t. The Summoner didn’t win, not all the way, but Her Imperial Condensation sure was scared. _But still, like dust, I’ll rise_. 1

Brown is _brown-nose_ and _brownie points_ , named for mythical creatures that like to work without formal wages, adopted for use in labeling troops of juvenile females being indoctrinated into the ethics of their adult society, gender dictating that they should be cooperative and not aggressive.

But brown is also natural-and-healthy, brown bag lunch, brown bread, brown rice, brown sugar. It’s caramel, and chocolate, and coffee. It’s rich and decadent in its own way.

Tavros is unassuming, but for all his self-effacement, he’s got boulders for shameglobes when push comes to shove.

Green is ranked as grass or emerald or olive or lime, it’s money and envy and growth or a _green thumb_ , and Sir Gawain facing his Fear, it’s _go_ and _Mothergrub Earth is Watching_ , and a country known for mythical magic midgets. It’s _greenhorn_ and _green at the gills_ , and neither of them literal or complimentary. Jade and teal are types of green, paint colors, fabric choices, but they’re not separated, not _graded_.

Blue is likewise contrary. Some things about it are familiar. The meaning of blue-blooded is the same, even if it’s less literal here. Cold water is the blue facet, just like red is the hot. But blue is also _true blue_ , which means loyal like Steve, or _blue collar_ , which means someone works with their hands for an honest living, and indigo here might refer to blue jeans or the Indigo Girls. She is certain that if there was a troll equivalent, they would have been long dead before the end came.

Humans sometimes call their home the blue planet, and sky blue, the _wild blue yonder_ , are both joy and freedom. Navy blue is authority, and blue ribbon is the best, _right before red and yellow_ , and _the blues_ are a state of sadness, or a music style that discusses it. _Blue balls_ is the state of having failed to get off. A _blue moon_ is a rarity, and not literal. There is only one moon and it is white or sometimes orange. It is not made of cheese and fairybulls do not jump over it.

Humans like to make stories for no other reason than entertainment. This is not unlike trolls. The frog prince. The magic beans. The blessed grub and the two ugly-bad broodmates. There’s blood and sex and death and sacrifice, living, all in one arc, arrows from the bowstring, the target one’s emotional reaction, catharsis, morals, indoctrination into cultural mores. And like history, all it takes is a bit of a twist and pull to keep everything the same but the _why_. She could spend ages just excavating stories.

There are practical things to blue: blue prints, hyperlinks, the dramatized blue screen of death. Sacred things like the blue of the human Dolorosa’s robe, _sacré bleu_. Mystical things, like amulets to cast off the evil eye and doors painted to do the same, cantraps for hand-fasting, _something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue_.

There were a warrior people who painted themselves woad blue and ran into battle naked. That part makes her a bit homesick for the fertile dirt of Alternia. She would have liked to have examined their bones.

Blue is a declaration of alliance, like all the other colors, not of a caste, but of countries, flags, political parties, sports teams, gangs. Blue is a categorization of gender, though not, in this place and time, so firmly enforced as fuchsia and its attendant pinks.

Purple is _not_ contrary to her expectations, not at all. It’s still a royal color. It’s categorized as flowers, lilac, lavender, violet, orchid, and gemstones, amethyst, tanzanite, iolite. It’s an exotic wood and ridiculously over-ornate writing, _melodramatic_. It’s a drugged haze and formal recognition of wounds taken in battle. It’s a loud statement of refusal to be ashamed of one’s self. It’s the worst and best of Eridan Ampora.

There are a lot of shades of pink, and the light ones are bubblegum and color coding for small human females, and supposed to be soft, sweet, inoffensive, _vulnerable_. There are darker shades, named for things, salmon, coral, Pepto-Bismol, Barbie, named for attitudes, _hot pink_.

_In the pink_ is healthy, at least for some, _tickled pink_ is amused, _getting a pink slip_ means losing your income. It’s one of the colors of the sunrise and sunset, both unthreatening. It’s one of the colors that were used to categorize and condemn people to mass culling, now reclaimed as a source of pride, something she recognizes, one survivor to another. It’s rose and Rose and Roxy, an empty space that should be filled. It’s rose-tinted glasses, determination to be positive about the world, or _naïve_ as Rose might say.

There are a lot of shades of “pink”, but _tyrian_ has only ever meant one thing.

 

**Fact: Captain America is a Hero, but Steven Rogers is something of a troll.**

Steve is big and strong and always tries to do the right thing, but what people forget, because Steve has very big blue eyes and an honest face, and because the cultural indoctrination was quite thorough, is that long before that, he was small, sometimes chronically ill, and lived by his wits.

Tony still has not caught on that when Steve asks him to explain twitter again, _just one more time, Tony, I think I almost have it_, Steve is trolling for funny sound bites for his twitter stream.

Steve does not tweet as Captain America. He has TheShadowRadioReport on both twitter and tumblr to relay a bit of humor regarding the especially ridiculous about modern life, and the especially ridiculous about Tony gets packed into a few characters and tweeted. He uses pseudonyms of course, and he doesn’t reveal anything sensitive or especially embarrassing, nothing that would compromise safety even if his identity is revealed.

It’s really just a bit of a pastime, lets him follow the Daves twitter feeds, reminds him to check in on Aradia’s tumblr, and Darcy’s, and Eridan’s Pinterest, currently preoccupied with taxidermy, anatomy and mythology. He follows Thor’s twitter, which features a lot of short odes to modern junk food. There are eight haiku about cheesy curls, one about the Queen of Sheba cake, and a shameless number discussing pop tarts. _Thor_ is not shameless, not, _without shame_ , but the things that he regrets are prioritized and Steve finds him a reliable brother in arms. It is a tradition older than armies to fantasize about food.

Kanaya’s Pinterest is mostly fashion and leatherworking. Sometimes he sketches a few things out for her, synthesizes something she requests. Her spatial reasoning and handiwork are impressive, she seems to get exactly what she wants out of her materials, things he wouldn’t have imagined himself, but in two dimensional rendering, he’s far better, precise with details and proportions, intuitive with gestural poses. It’s fulfilling to work with someone else, to see something materialize from the interaction. 

Karkat posts an ongoing reading list to the PesterSnapYourTrap forum, with occasional commentary and they have gotten into long debates that lingered over days and never really concluded. Through some strange quirk, his user ID on PesterSnapYourTrap comes out as CA and is purple. He hasn’t quite figured out how to adjust it, it keeps resetting itself and Sollux was sufficiently cranky the one time he asked that he suspects it’s deliberate. He doesn’t have a writing quirk, so it’s not like he’s pretending to _be_ Eridan. No one’s fooled, right?

Tony reads PesterSnapYourTrap more than he admits, but seldom in his more awake moments, so if “Eridan” regularly “sounds” different, even simultaneous with regular Eridan, it must just be a figment of his dozing mind…the kid’s been hanging out with Captain Artiste and it must just be rubbing off a bit.

Steve has a bet in on the pool through Clint regarding when Tony will figure out the twitter game. Six months, twelve days and counting…

 

**Fact: Anthony Stark has not consumed a full serving of alcohol since he fell from the sky encased in armor with all the flight capabilities of a wrought iron poker.**

He’s thought about it a lot. He’s poured a few, smelled ‘em, rolled a bit around in his mouth, like an old school cyanide tooth and he didn’t _quite_ bite down, even if he did swallow. Once. Or twice. Or something. Not often and not much at least. He keeps waiting for something to make him down the whole glass, but as hard as he stares at it, it’s just him and an inanimate object filled with inanimate chemicals. Nothing compels him to drink it. Nothing compels him to put it down. It is utterly up to him. The responsibility is his own. It is like emerging from a cave. _It is exactly like emerging from the cave._

His hands have trembled a bit and he’s turned up the volume in his workshop. He knows he’s an alcoholic. And he knows that there are no answers at the bottom of the bottle, any bottle, no djinn to tell him how to solve everything, but that’s okay, because he doesn’t need a djinn, what could he get that he doesn’t have already, that wouldn’t be _cheapened_ if it was given instead of gained? Tony is a lot of terrible things, has been accused of even more, is rather proud of some of his questionable choices, but he’s never been accused of _being cheap_.

He still wakes up sometimes and feels like the concept of responsible-for-minors has ambushed him like a brick wall at 90 plus mph.

If the thought makes him want to dive for the liquor cabinet, then that’s ample evidence that he shouldn’t. Alcohol still has that siren allure of familiarity and comfort, as empty as the promise may be.

But there is one final thing that makes him finally go completely cold turkey, _frigid gobblebeast_ , and that is finding Rose Lalonde practicing dark majicks in order to block JARVIS long enough to raid the booze. Rose is sixteen. Ish. Okay, the exact calculation doesn’t matter, the point is she’s young and better than he is and has the same problem, and only old irredeemable wrecks should be this stupid, right? Tony decides then and there that they’re going to have the same solution. All the unopened bottles go elsewhere, somewhere, thank goodness for Pepper, this is way below her paygrade but she just makes things work. He asks Rose if she wants a professional or homegrown pseudoscience. Ms. Lalonde declines the former, and perhaps he’s the adult and should press the issue to the minor in his nominal care, but Tony knows all about being managed. They fist bump, formally, to seal the deal. It is a vow. Tony is with it. Tony is all up with the happenings of today’s youth.

At least JARVIS will keep an eye on her, just like he keeps an eye on all of them. Metaphorically.

Aradia claims the opened bottles, and Tony is all set to protest, because he doesn’t _think_ she has the same problem, gods only know how trolls handle alcohol, but Rose had him fooled too. She hauls her stash to the roof and dumps it off, one splash of expensive brew at a time, the streams of liquid beautiful arcs and ripples through the air and wind that make Tony think of robotic dolphins and the challenges of friction reduction, fluid dynamics. He absentmindedly helps her bring the recyclable bottles back down and retreats to his workshop, still swimming with dolphins. Also, he needs dark majick detectors.

Below, not a single drop of the alcohol reaches the ground. 

 

**Fact: Dr. Jane Foster has a mind like a steel-trap making love to a sieve.**

It’s a sort of Mobius construction whose actual geometry makes angels sing, but still. Awkward. Beautiful. Potentially dangerous.

On the steel-trap side: all things related to her scientific interests. On the sieve side: all mundane tasks such as regularly eating or keeping appointments. This is one of the things that is both charming and frustrating about Dr. Foster, because she honestly doesn’t do it on purpose. On the plus side, for Darcy at least, babysitting Dr. Foster has proven to be both monetarily and emotionally well compensated.

On the minus side, for whoever would prefer otherwise at least, it means that when Dr. Foster and Ms. Jade Harley get into a long and involved conversation regarding physics in a local diner, the kind of conversation that involves not just the salt and pepper shakers, but a table’s worth of condiment dispensers and some stolen from other tables as well _as no fewer than three dozen napkins_ , and Dr. Foster subsequently heads back to her lab with a few new ideas but fails to mention said conversation, there’s no witness capable of discerning the importance of said conversation to report it to anyone who could.

Dude.

I warned you, bro.

 

**Fact: Dirk Strider swims laps in the saltwater pool until his body sinks and his mind quiets and he flips over at each end without opening his eyes.**

He hasn’t left the tower since they arrived.

**Fact: The boy known as Dove, and dovelyShrike [DS], and Davesprite, and one-of-the-Daves, and Strider-twin-powers-activate, and Shades-the-smallest, the boy who loves birds with sincerity and envy, has a rash.**

Hold up sex-Ed BroDad, it’s not _that_ kind of rash. Jeez. He doesn’t tell anyone about it, it’s kind of private, but not actually in an embarrassing place. It’s just embarrassing to discuss some stuff, okay? Dove, as he’s become by default, has a very spiffy mechanical arm. It weighs a bit more his real one, though not a lot, and he attends all the yoga sessions he can, practices with Bro using both his dominant and non-dominant sides to try to keep the muscles in his back and torso balanced.

His back hurts sometimes, and he goes to the gym and hangs off one of the bars until his spine pops. It feels good now, really good. His back and shoulder have healed entirely from the surgery to install the arm port, the last post-op was 10/10, two thumbs up, well-the-young-heal-fast-but-my-isn’t-this interesting. Bro and Steve, designated chaperones for the trip, hustled him out shortly thereafter. All that’s left is the occasional ache of muscles adjusting, compensating. We’re living in the future now. We’re making it happen.

He still wakes up feeling the cut, still wakes up as his mirror-brother-self does, remembering _how he died_ , and he stretches and flexes his flesh and bone hand and he stretches and flexes his bionic addition, and the both of them are mirrored flowers, fireworks, anemones. Miraculous. He’s not dead. Neither hand is so ill-mannered as to creak though he feels like they both ought to.

Sometimes he sidles up to Aradia and she sits behind him or on his back and rubs her strong calloused fingers along his neck. He shivers at the strength in her fingers, her psionics, her control. He shivers when she runs her fingers down between his shoulder blades and the itch briefly settles. He trusts her. He’s more than a bit in love with her, call it pale, or flush, or _rust_ , call it platonic as an ideal, give it a label that they ignore, two timelicious beings that never expected to survive, two among many. They are bros.

He also loves how many people there are, that it’s no longer the echoing corridors of vast empty places, and this is a love like _breathing_ , like he can breathe in community and exhale the poison of loneliness.

Dirk is not his brother, except in all ways that count. He thinks of the lonely child on the scaffolding between the sea and sky and there’s no one to blame it on, there’s no anger to buffer his sorrow. He _feels_ , and there are no sunglasses made that can hide or stop it.

It hurts and he makes the _choice_ to hurt, the choice to push through to the other side. If he gets all up in Dirk’s business until Dirk actually stops working to watch a movie with the rest of them, or less-than-stealth attacks him with a soft whoop and a jump that ends with him draped like a strange knapsack over Dirk’s shoulders, well, there are also times that he leaves Dirk alone. Both are choices. Maybe they aren’t always the right choices, but he does well enough. He does the same for real-Dave TM. He does the same for Bro.

And maybe he started it out of obligation, but he can hip check Eridan and shoulder check Vriska with a soft clang and no one gets stabbed for it. Vriska doesn’t quite _get_ “bros” but they arm-wrestle and he gives her a good run for it and if she wins almost every time, he doesn’t mind and she doesn’t seem to suspect.

Nepeta’s good for a pounce, giving or getting, and she might be deadly when needed, but she’s not hair-trigger bug-nut insane, so there’s that. He’s gotten over some of his issues and has learned to appreciate Terezi, can play twin chorus with Dave, one to each of her sides. He makes overtures to Feferi who hugs like a kraken practicing chiropractic wizardry. Her hair always smelts like salt and sugar. He hugs back as hard as he can and hopes it’s enough.

He heckles Rose by invading her space and complimenting her. The space invasion is nothing new, in the way that a hug from a passive-aggressive blood-relative is known to be an escalation of hostilities, but Rose keeps waiting for the backbite on the compliments and is slowly coming to the realization that there isn’t one. Rose is so swift she sometimes laps herself.

He hangs with Clint sometimes, maybe initiates video game challenges, and if they’re not exactly bros, they’re not exactly _not_ , Clint is alone and hurting and he understands that. He doesn’t have to listen to it, Clint’s not confessing anything to a kid, but he can provide a bit of not-alone, crack a joke. Little things add up. Dove’s been a splinter and a fragment, a screwdriver when a Swiss army knife was needed. He’s used to making do. He’s like a professional make-doer. Except now he thinks that he might actually get a Swiss army knife attachment in his arm if he were to so much as mention it to Tony. He’s matured too much to feel nostalgia for making do and doing without, or so he tells himself. Attitude changes a lot. He’s determined to be grateful, and it mostly works.

Occasionally, especially when someone’s had a bad day, Dove posts excerpts of _Girl Genius_ on the fridge with tiny Tony-heads cut and pasted from the online gossip rags. Sometimes Tony-head is multiple people and Thor-head joins them. He has a backlog of a couple dozen under his bed, all waiting for when they’re needed. Someone keeps taking them once they’re posted. (He doesn’t know Loki has started the reciprocal pile of already-posted-excerpts. Loki’s favorite character is the castle. Loki absolutely does not equate it with JARVIS, JARVIS is far too straight-laced.)

One of Dove Shrike’s strengths is that the only thing he really envies is flight. Something in the Between bled out a lot of the anger and fear and what was left was more mature, sometimes more sad. Less likely to hide. Not really more or less broken, but in a different shape entirely separate from the number of limbs involved.

He can hug Jade now and not worry about who she thinks he is. He has two arms and he’s not dead, that’s like winning the lottery at least twice. Bro’s alive. That’s a third.

He can lean into Bro and not worry about impending attack of smuppet ass. Yes, the evil little buggers did manage to turn up in this world, but what’s the worse that they can do? Making them is a comfort to Bro, he has to keep his hands and mind busy, just like Dirk.

Dove understands coping and he’s not afraid of cooties anymore.

He is fiercely, unashamedly, exultant that Bro is _alive_.

He doesn’t envy Real-Dave, to whom he’s ceded his past name and moved on, or Sollux, or Tavros, or poor Dirk, or lost Feferi, he doesn’t envy any of them when they also come to Aradia, or she goes to them, or they go to one another or others here. He returns the favor when it’s asked of him, Aradia likes a good neck rub as much as the next well-endowed troll, a rack of either kind carrying more than a bit of weight, and he understands that she’s giving him something, her trust, when she lets him behind and close like that, and _trust_ is its own type of itch scratched.

Tavros has strong clever fingers and he’s also good at giving or getting a thorough neck rub. He understands quiet as a choice and not a looming inevitability. He traces his fingers over the fish tanks and narrates to Dove what the fish think, flashes of sudden attention and unexpectedly clever or complex consciousness, fireworks of life within the bright loud tapestry of life here. Everything is miraculous, in a non-ironic way. This is its own exhalation. A prayer. A meditation.

They sit on the roof and get mobbed by pigeons, pigeons that go mysteriously unnoticed by the resident peregrine falcons, and Tavros narrates what the pigeons think until Dove can _almost_ understand them, can run his own internal track as to their thoughts. Tavros and Dove are bros.

Dove is more at peace with himself, and therefore the world, but he still spends more time than he ought to rubbing his back against doorways, as if there are phantom pinfeathers under his skin.

 

**Fact: Clinton Barton has trust issues.**

Clint Barton has a lot of issues. He has authority issues. He has issues of personal interactions and issues of personal space and issues of perching on the backs of sofas and balancing them with the front feet elevated so that someone comes by and distracts him and the whole thing flips.

He would have daddy issues, except he doesn’t have anyone to focus that sort of ire on and they’re entirely superseded by his brother issue, locked behind a door labeled **_Do Not Enter_**. Behind the door, there may or may not be a few figures playing poker. One of them might wear Loki’s face. One of his faces. It really doesn’t matter, it’s all in his head.

It’s not that he can’t trust, but he doesn’t trust easily, or completely, or without the expectation of disappointment. He trusts Natasha. He trusts the Black Widow. He trusts Philip Coulson, except for how he _didn’t really die_. Not the part where he didn’t die, he missed the bastard, mourned for him, was going to pieces over it, but the part where at some point Phil was capable of contacting him and didn’t. Because at some point, he trusted Phil more than he trusted Agent Coulson and now he doesn’t know what to think.

He trusts Tony to be extravagant, even when doing simple things like getting a sandwich, or building robots when a bit of elbow grease would suffice to fix the problem in a fraction of the time. He likes Tony. It’s not a criticism. He’s never been able to take up more space than he must when he wasn’t inhabiting a persona.

He trusts Fury to use him, though not always wisely or for things he’d agree with, if he was smart enough, knew enough about what was going on. He trusts Fury to use him until he’s used up.

He trusts Bruce more or less, he’s never tried to hurt him, he appreciates the yoga sessions, and the food, it’s hard not to appreciate food and less pain. He trusts the Hulk to be the Hulk and tries to stay out of the way. You don’t have to try to squash an ant to step on one by accident, no matter how fond the Hulk seems to be of his antlike teammates.

He trusts Captain America to do the heroic thing, to do the leading thing, and he lets himself fall easily into that. He trusts Steve not to try to hurt him. He doesn’t expect him to stand up for him.

He trusts Thor to put a dent in the enemy and always choose Loki over him. That’s alright. They’re brothers.

He hates Loki for understandable reasons, but also because, for a brief time, he was absolutely certain of his purpose and for a briefer time, Loki once slept with the only thing to guard him Clint and Clint’s skills and Loki’s conviction of the strength of his compulsion. It might have been entirely forced loyalty, but Clint _can’t tell_. He has issues with trusting himself, not that this is new, but he’s been better.  

Clint’s had sex, had the occasional one night stand that lasted long enough to be an informal boyfriend-girlfriend or boyfriend-boyfriend gig. It was alright, he’d do it again, he will do it again, he doesn’t expect more because he doesn’t think he can give more. It burned some energy, and he was mostly sure that none of them would stab him in the back.

But.

What he really needs, really envies, really hates himself for wanting, is this soft-gooshy-trusting thing all the kids are into these days. Someone who will not only hone him, like Tasha, watch his back, like Tasha, but _who can also help him sort his shit_. Someone who isn’t being paid to determine if he’s safe to go into the field. Tasha’s in too deep in her own shit to help anyone else, and Clint knows that a drowning swimmer can pull even a lifeguard under. Sometimes Clint is so tired, so tired he just wishes he could lay it all down and let someone else hold it. Whatever it is.

He really wishes he could trust Phil. If Phil gives him half a chance, he’ll trust him anyway.

 

**Fact: Even Loki doesn’t like Loki.**

Thor loves him. Loki maintains that Thor is an idiot.

 

**Fact: Natasha Romanova aka The Black Widow is older than she appears.**

She’s done a lot in that time, from high-speed espionage and wetwork to long-term mole work, changing out her mask for each, and she’s been married more than once, though it was, of course, a cover. If she’s brought a child to term or she’s had an abortion, it is her own business, and all still in the service of her work, if years past. Both are objectionable in their own ways, though the why of it is also entirely her own business, as is the singularity or plurality. She’s hunted and killed, and been hunted and survived things that rightly should have killed most humans. This is also objectionable.  This is also a fact: she’s never truly assumed the persona of her namesake and killed a husband. She’s never killed, or caused by some inaction to allow such to happen, a child who called her mother. This is also a fact: none of them know that she is still alive.

She’s been a madonna, a mother, a whore, a career woman, an ingénue, a druggie, a trophy wife, and a manic pixie dream girl, and often more than one at once. She’s been a ballerina, a paralegal, a personal assistant, a hedge fund manager, a math tutor, a radio personality, a trapeze artist, a French professor, a cattle rancher, a scuba instructor, and didn’t kill anyone as a nurse. (Okay, except for the target, but that doesn’t count.)

She’s also spent time as none of these things, and as nothing else easily labeled, the asset, if not at rest, standing down, between missions. Natasha is another cover story, but it’s closer to the meat of her than she’s been in as long as she can remember, so she supposes it would not be terrible to keep this mask until she grows into it or out of it.

Sometimes she didn’t have to pretend to like someone, but she knew she’d never be staying, has always known duty before personhood, and she protects herself in the only way she knows how. Once she was a child, but she doesn’t remember as much of that as she should, and even when she was a child, she was a soldier.

Fact: If there is anyone in the world she trusted entirely, it would be Clint (conditional on him being alone in his head) or Coulson. Also fact: for all that the Cold War is over, Natasha Romanova and her army of retired masks are still waiting for the thaw. But spring is coming, it may already have started in the deliberately unexamined places of her soul.  

**Fact: Philip J. Coulson died and lived again, a phrase even he never expected to use to refer to himself.**

He still regrets that Clint can’t seem to treat him quite the same way.

**Fact: Midgardians are both fragile and strong and the more Thor learns of his companions, the more he learns about himself.**

He is not always pleased or proud in the comparison.

Asgard does not have mental health professionals. Asgard has strict rules about duty and class and gender and the more that Thor learns about the diversity of Midgard, the children of Alternia, the more he wonders if what _is_ is “right” merely because it has always been. It is an uneasy thought, but it is his duty to think it. A king cannot cling to the cherished nostalgia of his childhood, the simplistic reasoning that creates a child’s world. Well, he cannot if he is to rule as well as he owes to his people.

Things seemed much simpler when men were men and mead was mead and it was all a matter of great deeds and eating contests and monster slaying. The Midgardians do not have a precise equivalent life phase, their armies and fraternities and survivalists not quite slotting into the same places, the same infrastructure.

Of course, the real question is, was it ever that simple, or was it only his grasp of the situation? How many enemies has he crushed uncaring of their families? Might there have been alternatives? How many strange alien beasts wandering from the world tree has he slain after sightings but no damage? Were they in truth beasts, or lost strangers?

How many of his companions drain their cups because there is nothing else to do?

He thinks of warriors who fought valiantly and well for ages and then crumbled when they returned home. If they are lucky, they survive or die quickly enough for ‘wounds taken in battle’ to cloak their shame. If they are lucky, they do not tar their families with their failure.

Asgard does not speak of their cowardice.

Midgard names it, tries to tame it, repeats, like the mantra of a child in the dark of bedtime _that there is no shame in it_ , tries to repeat it until those that most need to hear it might believe it. He does not know if that makes the Midgardians childlike or more mature than his own people. Both are painful alternatives.

He thinks of the wars on Midgard, so many, over who will rule and how, and he reads riddles regarding how to split cows fairly so that all might eat and argues with Karkat, a young warrior who would have been the merest frontline fodder in his own vanished world.

Government is more than just being the most powerful person in the room, holding death in your hands until all bow before you.

Loki was wrong, but Loki was also right. There is something wrong with Asgard.

He does not know if his father will be proud or furious with him. Either is questionable, and Thor has not often questioned his father, not before this, that was always Loki’s place, Loki-the-first-to-criticize, Loki-who-bore-the-brunt-of-anger-to-hone-their-plans.

Sif would be the first to tell him that a woman must be twice as brilliant as a man to get half the recognition, has told him, told him and the rest of their companions until it became a joke and she stopped bragging with words and just thrashed people back. Sif and Loki are usually at odds and he still cannot wrap his mind around his brother who is not always male, but Loki doesn’t make it _easy_ to try to understand him. Her. Them. By Mjolnir, he is _trying_.

It would be easier to think of Loki as possessed or entrapped, his, their attempt at an invasion was clumsy, _theatrical_ , despite the damage and deaths, but he knows that that is a fantasy as well. What he doesn’t know is how to settle Loki-who-ran-in-my-footsteps with Loki-blood-of-my-enemies, Loki-alien-and-strange-and-afraid-of-something-secret. Loki-who-eats-all-the-food-in-the-fridge-and-leaves-the-poptarts-in-a-block-of-ice is a welcome relief by comparison. For a moment, Thor can still pretend that Loki considers them brothers. Siblings.

Thor has never felt so slow, but a prince must not show hesitation that infects his companions, not on the battlefield and not in the hall. He tries to make up for lost opportunities and studies what Midgard has to offer, tries to let Loki come at him instead of hunting him down like a beast. Once, he made Loki laugh, and it wasn’t bitter or mocking, though Loki cut it off quickly and glared at him as if to dare him to make something of it. Thor is trying. He is trying to roll a great boulder up a great hill, as if he can only reach the top, everything will finally make sense. But how can it ever when his heart has embraced so much that is inimical to the other things he values?

There is Asgard and Midgard and all the realms of the world tree. There are his-people-whom-he-may-someday-rule and his-people-to-whom-he-has-promised-protection. There is Loki, who was there first in some ways, who left, or was driven. There are his parents, and only now does he wonder if his honorable beloved mother is a _person_ the same way Sif or Darcy are, if she often bridles her own desires and thoughts and beliefs to support his father and his uncompromising rule. A king may be advised, but he must not be questioned.

There is Jane, beautiful inside and out, Jane whom he thinks his mother would love and fears his father would think only a diversion. Asgard values warriors over thinkers. It is perhaps the root of Loki’s discontent, that he/she/they would never have been valued or respected in the same way, despite their brilliance. How evil is that? Thinkers bring change and Odin hates change, perhaps even _fears_ it, considers it an enemy of stability and law. But there are immovable objects, great stones and chains. And there are irresistible forces, great rivers, the oceans. Thor would rather be an irresistible force and try to be right than the stone that refuses to change. It hurts to think of his father as afraid.

There are his companions here, Steven Rodgers who might well have fit in Asgard, but who he suspects Asgard would not fit well. There is Tony Stark who is as arrogant as a prince and as meticulous as a dwarf and truly for all his words, just needs to be needed. There is Darcy, sister of his heart, who has shouldered the massive task of educating them in how to pass as natives, and why the local cultures are as they are. It is far harder to treat with the natives than to subjugate them. A younger Thor would have expected, demanded, fear and awe. He is glad, if still confused, that he is no longer that person. He would not tell them unless they asked, but Darcy and Karkat’s debate on governmental forms and reforms and problems are what first made him look more closely at Asgard. It is a debt and a weight and a lightness all at once. Asgardians age very slowly. That does not mean that the mind within their immortal bodies cannot perform a variety of aerobatics.

There is the son of Coul, steady and the very embodiment of _needs must_. There is Natasha, fierce like Sif and cunning like Loki. There is Clint, who reminds him now of the warriors who are heartsick, still serving valiantly when needed and wandering like a ghost between such. Thor is no healer, but he makes an effort to include Clint. He didn’t see Loki drawing away, being driven away.

Thor has vowed not to let himself be blinded by self-absorption again, and so he has started to notice things some may not have.

John Egbert is stronger than most human adults, moving the piano box about as a series of roommates get impatient with his almost endless practices. Equius Zahhak is stronger, and uncomfortable in it. Feferi Peixes is as strong or stronger. The fair-haired warriors of the Strider clan can all move almost faster than the eye can follow. Sollux and Aradia both smell of potential lightening. Tavros and Kanaya are steady and watchful, prepared. Nepeta has bladed gloves and walks without sound. Vriska and Terezi both carry knives. Jade is a maker like a dwarf and a thinker like his beloved Jane.

He sees little of Gamzee, and that mostly only with Bruce. Thor does not fear the Hulk, for all the Hulk’s bulk and power. The Hulk is not a beast. It likes to tumble buildings like a child tumbles blocks, but it does not _desire_ to hurt anyone. Thor has had slower companions, and those who like damage for less reason. Some were not always such, or moved from one to the other. Asgard does not have mental health services. 

Rose and Eridan both remind him of Loki, younger Loki, when perhaps the danger was there but not yet developed. He knows that if they become threats, he would stop them, and it hurts in a way it never has before. Loki was at least an adult, if he dabbled in the dark arts, it was a choice made. When do children become responsible? The children of Midgard and Alternia age both more quickly and more slowly than Asgardians, bodies racing up even as they scatter away their time on frivolities instead of martial arts.

The children of Midgard love him, love that he is big and strong and protects them and poses for pictures and listens when they talk. There are children in Asgard, but not so many, like ants in an anthill in this city. The children in Asgard are not left to approach him as if he is a beloved uncle. In Asgard, he is always prince Thor before he is Thor. It is hard not to be charmed with those who so clearly admire him. It creates a debt, an obligation to be as they see him. He thinks perhaps that he is a better person for it, and hopes that he never has to make a choice that betrays it. 

He thinks about the strange tales the Midgardians have of Loki, some odd mirror verses of things that happened, some that never happened to his Loki, and he asks himself if there is a another Thor who would stand by and allow his niece and nephews to be outcast, imprisoned, killed. He thinks about Ragnarok and wonders if it is an end, a beginning, or only his father’s fear of change.

Thor is changing, has changed, and there is no template of the person he is becoming. It is terrible and wonderful and free as a storm.

It is a riddle, and he fears that there is no solution that does not let something dear wither.

 

**Fact: Feferi Peixes is a nice girl. In fact, she’s uncommonly, untrollishly, _nice_. **

This doesn’t mean that she’s right all the time, or that she’s a good leader, or that she hasn’t done bad things. And that’s okay, because she’s grown up a lot and is still growing, and this time she’ll have a chance to choose her own destiny.

Mom told her not to worry about some things and so she tried not to. She didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about her Challenge, because it wasn’t going to happen. Eridan did most of the hunting, so she didn’t have to be there when he did bad things in her name, and it was all going to be a moot point once they got into the Game, and no one else would survive anyhow, and it wasn’t really her fault, so did it really matter?

The answer is yes. It did matter. And that yes and Feferi’s need to not drown in it are still doing a slow do-si-do in low gravity as they come to terms. They’ve won, right? Not everyone is needed anymore. And it’s not that she plans anything ill, but there are a lot of people outside the walls of the tower. Can she, can they, still be important if they are no longer the last, the only, clearly the protagonists in whatever cruel plot the Horrorterrors whispered like radio towers broadcasting a signal further into the dark? She was important on Alternia, but she never saw most of her people, never met the ones who would have worshipped her, or opposed her, or cheered her death in her Challenge, or who hated her for taking their lusii….

She was certain about the culling thing, that trolls needed to care for one another, but she’s still not sure about the how. She didn’t know many people, especially not face-to-fin. In one way that’s good because the sorrow for Alternia’s death isn’t entirely personal, most of the trolls she glubbed with are here. In another way, well, she’s not used to all these people. And she’s not used to the push back to her ideas, that re-defining culling doesn’t erase the old meaning, that it’s not right, not her right, to tell people how to live. She doesn’t really know anyone that she thinks would need to be culled by her definition.

Tavros would have been culled by the Empress’s definition, but she can’t imagine telling him to stay at hive and let everyone else take care of things for him. She can’t imagine that he’d agree, or that he wouldn’t politely tell her to mind her own business. Terezi might or might not have been culled, and she can’t imagine telling Terezi that she is incapable. It would help if she could have seen Beforus, could have known what did and didn’t work, could have known what her Beforus-self _thought_ worked and if Beforus’s citizens agreed. People are not pets. Is it still her responsibility?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a lot. She knows she’s grateful for a second chance. She’s grateful that she’s not responsible for Eridan, that they can talk now and part without being mad, or being afraid of being mad at one another. She’s grateful she doesn’t need to hurt anyone or ask someone else to hurt other people for her. She misses her Mom. She doesn’t miss that responsibility. She’s grateful for time with Sollux, and Aradia, and Tavros, and Dove, for the time to learn how she fits when she’s not in fear for her life. She still can’t face what Vriska has done without comparing herself. She’s grateful that Karkat has mostly taken charge, that there’s a project for everyone to focus on.

She’s cataloging Earth’s marine life, comparing and contrasting with Alternia’s, and the project is massive and also requires learning a lot to even estimate what she doesn’t know. On Alternia, it was important to know what was or wasn’t safe to eat, or wanted to eat you, or what ate what. Marine biology is so much more complicated than that, she’s still sloughing her way through basic biology and chemistry in an attempt to catch up.

Sometimes she studies with Tavros, Eridan, and Nepeta, who are working on the same thing for terrestrial life forms, and she’s left in awe of how much variety there is on land. Earth would be more accurately name Ocean, but the individual biomes on land still make her head spin with possibilities. And every conquered planet with indigenous life… how much was destroyed without ever being known to any but the dead?

It’s all overwhelming, like being caught up in a rip tide, unsure where she’s going or how long it will last.

**Fact: Sollux Captor is so sharp he cuts himself.**

So sharp he arrows through other sheeple’s BS like a swarm of Africanized killa bees through a Swiss meadow of flowers in with Heidi and all her goats frolic free of rich demanding invalids and commercialized cough drops, so sharp he cuts friends and foes and Bees off at the metaphorical knees whenever they venture to state that perhaps he ought to eat a sandwich or get some sleep, so sharp that SHIELD recruits his skills to run periodic mock black hat runs against their defenses while very firmly wearing a white hat.

Fact: Sollux Captor is not much for hats.

Granted, Aradia stole a fedora from Eridan and popped extra holes into it so he gave up instead of getting it back, and Sollux gave up instead of popping a fist through it because Aradia is very persuasive and this was like _offiiciially-not-piitch-but-ii-won-anyway-ehhehehe_.

And Sollux’s rail-thin body _did_ look pretty arresting in a tailored gray suit with thin, almost invisible, yellow pinstripes and a red and blue hex patterned tie, isn’t it weird that the fashion standard here is _starving?_.

And despite himself, he might have had a good time at the SI combined R&D and tech support Halloween costume party Tony insisted all the minors go to ( _Run along, my little gangsters and bootleggers, the nerd herd is going to love you. SI recruits starting with high school grads so it’s a dry party. It will do you all good to get out a bit, even if you’re not really leaving. But take it from the resident lush: don’t drink the punch._)

He got most of the references: the death star, tribbles, _bigger on the inside_. There is a fandom for reminding one not to forgot one’s _towel_. It’s a pan-universal compulsion of computer nerdom to binge on space operas and then competitively needle each other about them.

He _didn’t_ get why people kept asking him where his angel was or if he’d like to go bobbing for apples. He’s done plenty of unsanitary things in his frequently less than hygienic life, but he’s never willingly submersed his head in a tub of water, fruit, and mammalian pre-digestive juices the size of a drone’s bucket. He still leaves the party with a pocket full of names and numbers and possibly the unexercised rights to several human souls.

He also failed to recognize references to Rodents of Unusual Size, “wild nights are my glory” as stated by a “witch” in practical shoes, and something Darcy told Eridan about it being a property of cherries jubilee that one can fend off dragons with the dish if is properly prepared. If he had a better handle on the last, he might have set Terezi on fishdouche.  For Science.

Thing is, Sollux is not much for rules, though if he really wants to play that game there are _always_ loopholes, even if the loophole is a noose. (And he _doesn’t_ want to play the game, he really _doesn’t_ because there was _one_ thing on Alternia that was coming for him like an inevitable doom and there _was no loophole_ except for the double death of the universes and **_even Sollux wouldn’t have actually done it_** **_if he thought it would_** **_work_**.)

So when SHIELD has him sign their NDA on the dotted line, all the dotted lines, all of them, he never actually violates their agreement when he introduces another party to the work, someone who is not a “Citizen of the United States, citizen of any earth nation, stateless person who is unclaimed by any existing nation or by choice without valid citizenship to any countries on Earth, any life form from above or outside the troposphere or from any other plane of existence, whatever their professed allegiances…”. Earth grown artificial intelligences are as of yet not legally _people_.

Thing is, Sollux Captor and JARVIS Stark _are_ totally in cahoots (and there’s no need to be smug, Sollux, because JARVIS is in cahoots with a lot of people, he’s got irons in all the fires, all of them) and while Sollux Captor might not be familiar enough with humanity and bureaucracy to be able to pick out suspicious patterns, _JARVIS is_.

 

**Fact: The Winter Soldier is a myth.**

Also myths:   Automaton!LadyLiberty, the JFK assassination conspiracy, and Chuck Norris (he’s actually a rogue life model decoy of a former member of the Canadian special forces).

Not myths: Steven Colbert, Donald Trump, the Donald Trump caterpillar (venomous), the moon landing, Martha Stewart, Atlantis, Godzilla, and, sadly, the Tuskegee experiment.

(Borderline: Alligators in the sewers. They were caimans, they were pets, and they were in an abandoned subway line.)

*

**Fact: some of these things are not like the others.**

That is, whatever their relative truthiness, they are entirely irrelevant except to the person(s) directly involved.

*

*

*

**And now for a brief interlude: What is Bro up to?**

It may be noted that humor is a source of stress relief. Broderick does his part for the masses in the puppet production of: Life in Avengerlandia: Episode 1.

(It is of course assumed by the masses that this is just yet another vivid imagining by one of the Avengers’ many fans.)

The plot goes something like this:

Puppet!Steve and Puppet!Tony get into an argument over hamburger vs. steak and Puppet!Thor professes that he misses the great roast beasts of his homeland.

Puppet!Tony buys a very expensive Wagyu beef steer from Japan and has it flown over under the idea that fresh is better than aged, but then they can’t bear to kill and eat it. “How deep and soulful are these brown eyes,” proclaims Puppet!Thor, and a Greek chorus of teenage girl muppets sigh.

Angus the puppet!steer ends up living in Puppet!Thor’s apartment and he rolls out sod and feeds him beer hops to make him feel at home. Puppet!Thor regales him with tales of his homeland and makes him a cape. A floor below, Puppet!Steve wonders why there’s a leak in his ceiling.

(Post-production, Loki steals the cow puppet, now dressed in a tiny mockup of Thor’s outfit, or at least the cape. He hides it under his bed and emphatically thinks of it no more. JARVIS is the soul of discretion.)

*

Avengerlandia gains more than modest meme power and Bro is between projects so episode two goes something like this:

There’s a misconception that The Black Widow is eye candy or the token female. Cue a “true look behind the scenes”… where The Black Widow is… a giant black widow. Wearing her hair back in a bun. Instructing a ballet class. With the rest of the Avengers as students.

Puppet!Thor’s leotard has a tiny cape and little hammers on it. His legs are exceedingly hairy. Puppet!Hawkeye’s outfit is purple with yellow arrows all aiming at his biceps. It has feathers on the epaulets. Puppet!Hulk is wearing a rather serene expression and florescent pink dance pants with little green unicorns on them.

“No, no no!” The Black Widow slams her cane with two legs and gestures with two legs at Puppet!Captain America, in a striped and starred leotard. “Your pliés, they must be more _pliable_. Your jetés, they must be **_jettier_**. Again.”

Puppet!Tony whines that his giant brain and machinery make this redundant. His unitard is gold lamé with red pin striping. The arc reactor is a set of tiny balled up multicolor Christmas lights that blink in patterns. She thwaps him with her cane.

“This is America, Mr. Stark, we all must wear many pairs of shoes.”

“You mean hats?”

“If I meant _hats_ , I would have said _hats_. I have one head, _no_? I have eight limbs, _yes_? I do not tell you how to speak _Russian_ , Mr. Stark, why would you tell me how to be _speaking the English_? You Americans, so _assuming_. I will blow your “big brain” with your inherent fallacy: Russian salad dressing. It is not _Russian_.”

She taps her cane and they all lean one way as if compelled.

“French fries, not _French_.” Tap, lean the other way.

“German chocolate cake, not _German_.” Tap, lean, like a metronome.

“Mongolian beef, not _Mongolian_.” Tap, lean.

“Shit-on-a-Shingle, _entirely American_. Now,” She slams her cane, and they all jump.

“When I say jeté, you **_jeté_**.”

And they do.

After the clip is loaded on YouTube, real Natasha steals arachnid puppet Natasha. The puppet’s plush body and fuzzy legs are very soft, the silent, unanimated form more comforting than menacing. What the real Natasha thinks of spider-puppet-Natasha is never stated. It may be of interest however that the puppet is not used for target practice, or hustled off to some silent disposal in a dumpster somewhere. JARVIS could note that real Natasha spends a significant amount of her alone time cuddled with it. Fortunately for the continuing stability and functioning of this odd little family, JARVIS is the soul of discretion.

*

(Bro has learned something of the power of plush toys to simulate touch, to mimic the pressure of a hug. Even introverts are still social creatures.)

*

*

*

1“Still I Rise”, Maya Angelou


	16. and miles to go before I sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the tower of Tony Stark’s giant phallic residence, all, or almost all, are sleeping. Some are dreaming…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh, oooh, ooh! Time for rambling… There is fanart! I was idly wondering if there was in fact a NYC psychic and if they used the #NYCSmallMediumAtLarge tag. Alas, no. But. Something better! Lovely art! (Look at all these here exclamation marks. I mean each and every one. !.) Go, fill your ganderbulbs with lovely and your pumpbiscuit with sweet. This here chapter will be here when you get back from Kaenith’s tumblr(s):
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> <http://kaenith.tumblr.com/post/112441351308/lately-ive-been-reading-tony-stark-is-not-willie>
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*

“HelloOo, my amber-gold boyos!!”

Roxy is sitting on you. Why is Roxy sitting on you?

 **_ ROXY _ ** _is sitting on you._

You are Dirk Strider, and you absolutely do not bolt upright and hug her. You perform a manly abdominal crunch and are clearly wrestling with the fist-kind rifle specialist. She hugs you back, and then flicks you between your too-naked eyes. Why don’t your wear your shades to bed? Oh, wait, you’re still dreaming. You form them over the bridge of your nose and the legs unfold over your ears.

“Eheheheh. So “cute”, Dirkath.”

Wait, when did Captor get here? You twist toward the sound of spindly computer nerd but Roxy throttle-hugs you before you can object properly.

“Dirk-my-smirk, you big doof! I miss you too! Like, all the missus! Also,” she leans over your shoulder where a projection of your project suddenly hangs, “This should be adjusted to 42, even-Steven. It’s a Thing. But the good news is that all the hardware will work. Just a few tweaks here and there.”

She leans over and rearranges some more as you crane your neck to watch. You can’t afford to miss anything. You can hear Captor object as she starts in on the code as well as the layout.

“Don’t look at me like that! Who’s on the other side? That’s right! Me! And I can’t wait to see you all. So hurry up! This section’s shrinking and we have two weeks and three days before we have to switch to a new one and start re-calculating. Okay, maybe two weeks and five days, but leave a window because if we have to haul Mr. Grumpy Guts _any_ longer in an enclosed shrinking space, we might chuck him in a cosmic trash compactor, no matter _how_ much Callie pouts. And she can pout like _whoOoa_.”

She sits back and wiggles her fingers at this. You collapse back and she rides you down. Two weeks. You can finish in ten days if you push it, which leaves time for calibrations, just not much sleep. Of course, this is all theoretical until it actually works. That has never stopped you before. (You really want your rocketboard, but you’ve been too focused on The Project to run a selfish side jaunt. If you don’t leave the tower soon you won’t just get rickets, you’ll go mad. Leaving the tower seems wrong when your friends are still on the other side. Flying wouldn’t count. But you can’t fly. You really want your rocketboard.) Roxy sprawls out on you and addresses Captor more directly. You don’t even care. The relief is too thorough.

“Hey, HoneyBee, this here loop is all wrong, try again. And you need more pink, but that’s a personal opinion.”

She leans over and plops a big pink kiss on his cheek. You shift under her as her weight pulls the both of you to the edge of the bed. You can hear Captor try to growl back but you somehow know that Roxy hits all his buttons with ease and he’s probably too busy battling a sleep wiggly or two to pull it together before she…

“Gotta go, boyos!” Her comforting weight is suddenly gone. You stare at the ceiling. It’s got stars.

“Now, where’s Equius? I’m gonna hug that lunk until he pops another set of glasses. You should try it sometime, BabyBee.”

“Bleurgh.”

Sollux should watch how enthusiastically he shows his dislike. If this wasn’t a dream, Equius would be blushing over pitch solicitations. It is _your_ job to needle Mr. Ed. No need to horn in, Four-Horns. Roxy keeps going like she’s not distracted by the sight of the forked tongue that is doubtlessly on display to produce a proper noise of distain.

“Then I’m going to check on his calculations. And maybe pop in on old-you, D.” She pats your stomach, turns to Captor.

“Mmmph, Sol- _baby_ , you need to have a hot older-self for me to drool over too, it just doesn’t work when the D.I.L.F. is your aged-up _twin_.”

Her voice starts to fade before he can reply.

“…Callie’s got it easy, she just needs to check in with Jade. Kanny and Rosie-Posie are working on borders, but they’re not doing any of the math. Or messing with it.”

Captor must of have managed some sort of clearer reply, because her voice comes back clearly again.

“What do you mean he’d snap you in half or you’d do it yourself? Sol- _Babe_ , you are _failing_ to see the _potential_ here. For a smart dude who gets headaches from things _looking for him_ , maybe that smart dude should find a place where they **_can’t find him_** , hmmm?”

You manage to roll over just enough to catch his mouth drop open at the moment of realization. That was the key to Fang-opolis, the city gates are wide open. She tickles his chin and he snaps his maw shut. She leans in to buss him on the cheek she didn’t hit the first time. She wraps him in a hug and he doesn’t even try to struggle. Blue screen of death. Game over. Does not compute. You should sympathize but you’re not actually that nice.

“There, all even. Now, Mama Roxy would _love_ to be there to wrap you in her void and get you a good day’s sleep, but I’m not exactly _here_ yet, am I? So you just keep up the good work, and I’ll be by soon, open season for void-hugs. In the meanwhile, you need to do what you need to do.”

This is directed at the top of his head as she’s buried his face in her boobs. You probably can’t suffocate in a dream. Probably.

“Tah, my lovelies!” She waves her scarf at the top of his head and then at you.

And she’s gone again.

You concentrate very hard on rolling over. When you hit the floor, you should wake up, and you want to start working as soon as possible. You hold tightly to Roxy’s edits and spare a thought to hope you don’t forget the rest of this. 

*

Your name is Sollux Captor, and in fifteen hours you will wake up with activity like a set of confused horrorterrors in your hexagonally-patterned boxers. Your body will feel too heavy to roll off the pile of unlaundered clothing and library books into a cold shower, or even to shove a hand down your front.

 _You_ _will not care_.

You will be sleep drunk from the first full day’s, or night’s, sleep since your group took the last exit out of hell. Door number two, Lady or the double-grinning Tiger, you don’t care which this world is, because it is still worlds better than a stick in the eye, and you, of all people, would know.

You will doze for an indeterminate amount of time, relishing the silence in your head. Karkat will dare to limp into your Bee-patrolled realm bearing coffee and an omelet. The Bees will not chase him, not even a little. Traitors. (You may, when you feel properly in pain again, and therefore mean, tell them off in _very strict_ terms, but that is in a far distant and fuzzy future.) You will drink the coffee and shortly be wearing the omelet as a very avant guarde chapeau, and you will still be smiling as he storms out with the plate. The omelet will be delicious. Your perfect coding will ensue. It does not need more pink. That would be ridiculous.

*

Your name is Equius Zahhak and, though it may be below one of your caste to admit it, an engineeriquist must deal in truth.

This new world is full of both befuddling social mores and intriguing possibilities. Also, there is a very pink human in your dream and you have popped another set of glasses. Dream-glasses. Or something. You may need a dream-towel.

You can’t help but listen to her anyway, and nod, and ready your mind to re-enter the waking world. You look forward to conferring in person. In your sleep, you scratch at the bandage on your inner elbow. It is not a gadfly come to sting you, only the rightly earned minor pain of your contribution to this night’s work.

*

Your name is Terezi Pyrope, and you are one of the few souls in the tower that is still awake. You are sitting on the roof, alone but for the shuffling and cooing in the dovecote. Your eyes are shut, not that it makes a difference. Your nose is never off, but you are breathing steadily, a deep mediation. Your mind fills like a glass with water, but even as it reaches for the top, the depths become deeper and you hold more. You will rise tomorrow with the sun and report to the basement to confer with your compatriots. Tonight, you do not roam the streets but hold vigil for the future.

*

Dozens of floors below, you are Rose Lalonde. You are lying in a bed that is encircled by painted lines archaic and mathematical and (mostly) free of darker influences. (All knowledge has the potential to be used for evil. Who knows better than a healer what will harm? Are not medicine and poison often the two sides of a coin, the thin blade edge the dose?) The outermost lines are a very particular blue. One might even say that they are Void-blue. Whatever you See, you are unlikely to be Seen. Whoever else is sleeping tonight, they are likely to See a great deal themselves, though only some of it will be True. In the embrace of your matesprit, your girlfriend, your partner in life and in purpose, you open your eyes and See.

Thin silver lines stretch out before you. They do not radiate from or to you, but you can touch them and know where they go. You have a few things to get done tonight, but you note that Loki has a set of lines splayed out from his body, busy being a busy-body, much like you, only in multiple places at the same time. You make a note to follow up on the Asgardian trickster once you finish your other duties. You may find his perambulations most informative, just as you do his prevarications, and he will leave a trail yet.

You lower your mask, an ivoried moon, old bone of some dream beast so massive it must have shook the ground like a tree walking. You look through the cratered eyes and behind the serene mask’s smile, your smile is much sharper. Woe betide those who meet mask and the mind animate behind it tonight.

You pick up your lacy white parasol with its Thoth-headed handle in one hand, your white sleeves drifting a bit more like mist than cloth, the dark blue tattoos of notice-me-not and keyword search terms stark against your dream-pale skin. You place one high-laced white boot on the closest line, then the other, and begin your own perambulations. You are secure in your footing, however, this is not quite the correct line yet. You leap and open your parasol at the zenith of the arc, and land on your intended line, the skirts of your dress floating with an active but serene motion like the winged fins of a cuttlefish. Much better. You are practically perfect. This is not a surprise.

You continue your constitutional with a little hum. You know when the song in your heart matches that of the line, you will be on the right track, and you will follow it until you are done. At that point you will open the door in your chest and the hummingbird will streak out, an arrow through the dark. You will shut your parasol and fall into a cloud of calyptra moths. The flutter of their wings will sound like the rustle and snap of hundreds of folding fans, opening and spinning as you fall. You will wake as the small bird delivers your findings. In this manner you will circumvent the difficulty in remembering your travails. Dreams may be nonsensical, but tonight all of yours work in metaphor.

All you have to do is find the matching melody, without losing your head. If you jump too far at once, it will come unhinged, snicker-snack, and all sorts of monsters might fall out and take flight. You are a bonedoll medusa and none must meet your gaze without your permission. You are hunting.

*

Your name is Jade Harley and you can’t _wait_ to wake up and get back to work. You might actually need to get back to bed first, because you are currently sleepwalking back up a level to your Project and you probably shouldn’t work unsupervised while asleep. Safety first! Sometimes. You really shouldn’t weld without awakening. Catching one’s hair on fire is always embarrassing.

You can’t wait to meet Roxy in person. You and Eridan will show her all the _best_ pieces in Tony’s collection of overkill rifles and make puppy eyes at Clint until he gives you pointers on archery. And Sollux will just go to pieces to have another coder to compete with. It will be adorkable. You can’t wait to see how Nepeta paints them. (You’re pretty sure that JARVIS has suspicions but no firm determination of your Project, and for a usually all-knowing presence, it’s going to be fun to pull one over on him.)

And you can’t wait to meet Jake, because even if he’s not really your _Grandpa_ , you’re family. You still miss Grandpa, but you’ve all been through so much. You’ve come to realize that you are more afraid of losing who you have than you are afraid of not seeing him again. This is probably natural. You still feel guilty.

You can’t wait to meet Jane because one, she’s awesome, and two, John really needs someone else that he thinks can understand. You’re pretty sure his Dad is beyond reach, and you’re not sure that John has really had a chance to mourn the way you did Grandpa. You’ve seen John angry, and maybe depressed, and forcefully cheerful, and honestly cheerful, and all sorts of dorky, but you’re not sure he’s ever accepted that none of you can go home, _because home doesn’t exist anymore_.

John is really, _really_ good at denial. You can’t hit the wind. It just goes elsewhere.

You have a new home now, and a new family. A new family doesn’t mean they replace the family you miss, but it is a terrible shame not to fully engage out of some misguided loyalty. You know that his Dad would want him to be happy. You’re just not the person he needs to hear it from.

You curl up again. In the morning, you will wake in a pile of food wrappers and pipes, curled up with Bec. Good Dog. Best Friend.

*

Your name is Vriska Serket and you are seldom content, but tonight, in your dreams, you are. Tonight you are flying like Wendy-bird, minus the stupid white target dress, plus some awesome wings and pirate gear. You stoop, you swoop, you soar. You hunt, seeking your enemies, even if you don’t know who they are. You will wake up with the sense that you have just rolled the dice, that they are about to come up perfect, and you won’t even mind the knowledge that you are _sharing_ the luck. You are growing up.

It’s different from how you imagined it.

*

Your name is Dave Susan Strider (Broderick is a sick bastard), Dove Shrike by default and then choice, and your dreams are a whirl of wings, the city seen from above. You are a hawk. You are a bat. You are a Bee. The city is a set of geometric shapes below you, the interlocking city blocks are cogs that tick away a precise accounting. There are windows lit below you with something more than light, people waiting for messages, people waiting for passage. You are a Messenger. You will not fail. You cut the air with your wings, and you _fly_.

*

Your name is Dave Elizabeth Strider (Universal Constant: Bro is one sick bastard) and you dream of being replaced, and no one notices. You dream that you can’t remember if you are the original or not. You dream that you are and no one believes you. You dream that you aren’t and no on notices.

You roll over and over until you hit another body, wake just a bit when Dove shoves you back. The room’s too dark for even your sensitive eyes to identify any of the other softly breathing mounds on the floor, though you know that one is Karkat and Gamzee, one is a rumpled pile containing Jade, Tavros, Aradia, and Nepeta, one is Darcy and Eridan, back-to-back, and one is Vriska and John, the last the instigator of “sleepover night”.

Dove shoves you again when you refuse to roll away. You roll back over and crowd him against the wall. He sighs but doesn’t shove you again. Well, at least one person would notice. You sleep and dream of trying to smuggle crocodiles in your pockets past the TSA.

 _Nah, man, they’re just caimans. Practically toothless, just bristles in there, like baleen whales or something, right? Yeah, the red’s natural. They’re like_ super _endangered. Like, their entire planet exploded and someone shoved this here suitcase of babies into a Clark Kent capsule and shot them off. ‘God speed, young astrolizards! God speed!’ And, like,_ I _am the ambassador of planet bipedal-mammal to the tiny refugees of planet tiny-space-lizards._

You wake up again when the TSA agent confiscates your suitcase and you’re filling out miles of red tape. Weird. Rose warned you about tonight, but you’re pretty sure it’s all just a product of nuclear Doritos on chocolate ice cream with jalapeno fudge sauce. Rose hates it when you make choco-taco jokes.

You lean over, burp in Dove’s ear, endure the loving slap this produces and try to will yourself not to pick up where you left off when you fall back asleep.

*

Your name is Feferi Peixes, and you are **_so_** **_excited_**! Another life player is coming and you can’t wait to compare notes. You do some loop-de-loops in the salt pool and settle back to sleep in the deep end. You dream your lusus is as tiny as a cuttlefish so that she can rest in your embrace. She’s very tired and needs it. You tell her that you love her and you miss her, but if she’s really there, she can’t visit unless she comes in a form that can’t hurt or scare anyone ever again. It is a melancholy dream and you know when you wake that it really was just a dream, but it still makes you smile.

*

Your name is Darcy Lewis, and in your sleep, you are smiling because you are somehow positive that things are about to get even better. When you dwell in a constant state of concentrated awesome, that is pretty damn difficult. And awesome.

You will wake up well-rested and having flipped so that, disregarding the mass of blankets you are both still separately wrapped in, you are the big spoon, it is you. Eridan will not object. You may, possibly, succumb to the righteous and not at all terrible temptation to pet his hair and snuggle closer. Nepeta will wink from where she will be sitting sketching against the wall. Karkat will still be softly snoring in the circle of Gamzee’s skinny arms.

*

Your name is Clint Barton and you are _so tired_ , all you want to do is sleep, but you can’t because you’re on your way back to Phil and the helicarrier to be debriefed while the details are fresh. Tasha is besides you and you know that she is equally tired, but she’s better at hiding it.

If someone were to ask you where your family was, you would know that Tony and Bruce are at a conference of some sort, that Pepper is traveling for SI, that Thor and Jane are on a _Science!_ fieldtrip of some sort.

(Darcy is contagious. So is Jade. It is also possible that you are more susceptible to influence than you’d like. _Weak minds_ and all, as Loki likes to whisper-hiss at you when he thinks no one will notice. _God_ that’s creepy. And depending on a minor to run interference? Even creepier, because you _can’t_ quite bring yourself to pull up your funderwear and stop. Someday someone is going to realize what a miserable failure you are as an adult and you’re either going to get taken out back like Ol’ Yeller or introduced to your very own padded cell and huggy jacket.)

You are too tired to realize that this accounting of adults means the kids are alone with Steve, “Bro”, Darcy, and Loki. You will get back home without realizing how lucky you are that home is still standing. You will get back home without realizing that as much as you need to sleep, you are probably better off not finding it in the tower, at least not tonight.

*

You are John Egbert, and you are flying while playing a piano. Or maybe the piano is flying and you are merely playing it? You know that if you do not play fast enough, you will fall. Worse, you will fail, and Dirk will fade, and that is unforgivable. You play faster and Jade stumbles, the jangle of notes she can’t catch drawing blood from her as if they were a flight of Sollux’s shuriken. You slow down to let her catch up but the piano lurches downwards, and Kanaya screams. It is a horrible sound. You didn’t know that Kanaya could ever scream like that, like something is wrenching her insides so hard that the pain must come out somehow. You play faster again but the keys are sticking, the sound is off, you can’t keep time. Karkat is trying to tell you something. You can’t hear him.

Dave is lying on the topboard bleeding, lungs burbling and rattling like he’s drowning, and the blood is in the keys, that’s why they’re sticking. Aradia is there and you sigh in relief. Aradia snaps his neck. You scream, the piano lurches, you play again before it can fall. He sits back up and thanks her, flesh dripping from his bones until all that’s left is a skeleton and his sunglasses. He tips his top hat to her, bows and sweeps his cane like a gentleman. Dove is orange and feathery again and they fist bump. You tell Dave that _this is not his quest bed and to put his skin back on_. Vriska is there and she backs you up. Then Tavros is there and he tells her that she can’t tell anyone what to do. _This is a new world and we are all free._

You’re not sure you agree. This is a new world and you’ve lost everything but each other. Freedom is nothing left to lose? But you’d kill to keep what you have and you’re terrified that that doesn’t scare you more. When did you become a monster?

Then Dave is not Dave anymore, but a green munchkin, still skeletal but at least he’s wearing his skin. The green munchkin throws a tantrum and you catch it. Jade leans over your shoulder and coos at the tantrum. It is a very small universe. She leaves with the universe and you are left alone with the green munchkin. It wants ice cream. You don’t know where everyone else is, so you fly it to McDonalds for soft serve. It orders a twist and the piano lands on it. You are the worse babysitter ever. It is you. Casey is gone. Casey’s people are gone. You are a genocidal maniac. You father would be so ashamed.

You will thrash and wake up just enough to realize it was a dream, then go back to fitful sleep. In the morning Vriska will wonder how her sleep shirt got a damp spot on the shoulder. You will _never_ admit that you found her smell so comforting you woke up chewing on it.

*

You are Steven Grant Rodgers and you dream that you caught Bucky in time, that the two of you somehow escaped the plane, that you have grown old together with someone who will always watch your back.

Sometimes this means you marry Peggy, or that he marries a girl with flashing eyes and a devil to match him, that you do dishes at the sink and watch your kids out the window, play stickball in the street with a small crowd of children with his smile, her smile. You grow old together, all of you but these dream children, and nothing is wrong with letting go at the end, it is so much more peaceful than the 60 million ways 60 million people died in the War.

You wake in the dark, with only JARVIS for company, and under your watering eyes, your hands are still young, your grief and guilt still fresh. Bucky has been dead longer than you were asleep, longer than you have lived, if not longer than you have technically been alive. You are Rip Van Winkle, returned from a stay among ghosts. People depend on you, and it is a familiar, but in you lives the dread that it will end badly. How else does anything ever end? Still. You have work to do. There are so many people who depend on your work. Some even depend just on you. Buck up, Soldier. Things will seem brighter in the morning.

You turn the light on, and when your hands mostly stop trembling, you draw.

Your room smells like laundry detergent and art charcoal and leather soap, and not in the least like arctic winds or jet fuel or even dirt and blood. You are familiar enough with your mind to know that the bed behind you right now is a gaping door that only leads to more unsettling dreams.

You draw Peggy and Bucky, just to prove you haven’t forgotten. You draw the children, the real children, not those you imagined. You draw the family you have and not the one you might have had, if you had lived your life in a linear fashion, and you know that you could ask JARVIS for stills, you’re probably misremembering some things, but something in the process makes it more real. You are counting up your riches and not your sorrows. You are still alive to count them. That’s one. It _is_. Not everyone gets a second chance. Or a third.

In delicate lines and shading you draw Tavros, gentle hands cradling a pigeon on the roof. He has beautiful eyes, a face prone to smiling, a _gentleness_ that is rare and often serene, something some might wrongfully believe a weakness. If trolls grow like humans, if the breadth and cut of alien bones under skin mean the same thing, you think he’s going to grow big, tall and broad, a gentle giant. You think of his expression when communing with animals, when he is listening and patient and immovably certain, and you can only imagine that it is akin to Saint Francis’s.

You draw Sollux in an unguarded moment, not-quite-smile baring two fangs on one side, and Aradia, hooded eyes full of secrets, smile full of laughter. You don’t spend much time with Sollux, not outside of family dinner nights or other activities, but you recognize the need for time alone, and the need for time with people without being expected to interact, and the need for attention, sometimes even when he cannot express it. Aradia reads all his moods and if she doesn’t always comply with what he thinks he wants, she’s always listening. You think of Bucky, and co-conspirators, and pulp fiction space opera books, far removed from all-too-real war. You think of that unspoken internal warmth to know that someone always has your back. You sketch them out as a book cover, quickly, without much detail, back to back, rockets and space colonies spinning out behind them. Adventuress Aradia’s grin is broad. Space Explorer Sollux only allows a tiny smirk. Their hands are linked between them.

You draw Vriska, tossing her hair to make it clear just how little she cares, eyes trained on Bro to judge how he reacts making it abundantly clear that she _does_. You draw her tiptoeing past a sleeping Ponybot with an armful of stuffed longhaired Persian and a fake mustache. That is probably not how it happened, but it makes you smile anyhow.

You draw Broderick Strider, face a seeming blank, the tiniest of smudges showing amusement around his mouth, hands each flocked with masses of tiny scars, blades and edges and solder burns, calluses. Bro bluffs a lot, says what he wants, or feels, or thinks, _or the exact opposite_ , dares someone to call him on it. You can sympathize with some of that, envy it occasionally. He’s the only adult from their universe and he’s been trying to chaperone without stealing any thunder from his charges. He’s in over his head, but still swimming. He can still say things to set baby SHIELD agents off kilter, things you don’t dare indulge in. Captain America is a symbol. The weight is familiar, the responsibility humbles you, but damn if you didn’t wish you could sometimes set it aside long enough to crack a joke outside of combat that didn’t get enshrined or dissected as _The Gospel of America According to Captain America_.

You draw Clint, cleaning his equipment on the coffee table under loudly inquisitive speculation and gazes, and Nepeta, perched on the couch back, about to pounce, eyes dancing in mischief.

You draw Rose, lecturing Loki on the history of modern psychotherapy and the various dysfunctions of its experts, and Loki rolling both eyes and pretending to be unwillingly trapped, hands holding her yarn mid-winding process, hardly captive. Loki claimed that it was the price of a replacement scarf but it gives you hope to know that not everything must be a battle. You let the lines of thin wool fade out at the edges of the page, link back in, form little knots over ankles and wrists and throats, lace and chains and connections.

You draw Bruce and Gamzee, heads together over a cookbook in the kitchen and you can smell curry, can taste raisins. You draw and you draw, and you don’t analyze.

In bold strokes and tiny details, you draw part of “Team Robot!”, Dirk, Equius, Jade, and Tony, surrounded by the disassembled remains of something unknown, an exploded diagram of physical parts in concentric circles, Jade’s head and ears tilted back, fist pumping the air, the exclamation “That was _awesome_!” almost audible. Your memory allows you to detail most of the pieces, even when you don’t know what they are.

You draw Phil, teaching Kanaya a basic waltz, both respectful of one another’s personal space, but still graceful. You draw Darcy flying through a combination with Eridan, their faces lit in identical grins at that moment when, hands locked over each other’s wrists, their spin away from one another pulls them back together like a whip snap.

You draw Dave and Dove, both talking, both flanking Terezi with probably intentional symmetry as they walk, their inner arms draped over her shoulders, her hands tilting both their chins, her teeth bared in a satisfied smile.

In the tower, Dove does not hide his prosthetic, he simply goes about his day and occasionally pulls things from the oven without pretending to need a potholder. Outside the tower, he might wear gloves, keep his hand in his pocket, or let an oversize sleeve hang down. It’s not shame so much as ducking uncomfortable conversations with strangers. You understand the feeling and have tried as much with a baseball cap, with less success.

You draw Pepper, seated, one heel in hand, spine relaxed, swinging her free foot as she discusses fashion as armament with Kanaya. You wish they could have met Peggy, all three of them fierce and firmly straddling the lines between this-is-allowable and this-is-expected and how-dare-you-act-as-if-I-expect-anything-more-than-my-innate-rights. You wish you had more of Peggy than memories, photos, and SHIELD.

You draw quick gestures with few details, Dr. Jane Foster, eyes wide, having stumbled to the kitchen to rummage blurrily for Pop-tarts and coffee, greeted instead with a four course brunch courtesy of some sort of competition between Gamzee and Bruce and Team Robot, this time including Bro, everyone covered in flour. The flesh and blood side won, but Team Robot was consoled with leftovers.

You draw Feferi and Thor, arms waving as they describe the wild animals that don’t exist on earth, bigger, no, **_B-I-G-G-E-R_**.

You draw John, eyes squinted and mouth open in a laugh, having just gotten the better of someone.

John can enter or exit rooms unnoticed and substitute items with sleights of hand and create traps with household items. His pranks are frequently annoyingly accurate. So many of them could be deadly if he intended them so - load a computer virus while no one’s looking, swap out one drink for another, substitute in a small explosive for a variety of objects small enough for sleights of hand. It is your experience that cannot help but note the applications, and you’re sure that you’re not the only one. He does some of them with a single-minded intensity and some with an absentminded mien of someone who’s not really present, like so much thoughtless pacing or pencil drumming. You don’t think he _can_ stop.

You also notice how careful he is that he never springs traps on Clint, or Natasha, or Bruce, or you. He torments Karkat with canned fart noises and cows mooing, but not sudden motion. He glitter bombed Tony, but not in the lab. He very carefully sewed bells onto all of Eridan’s scarves and braided more into Darcy’s hair without either of them noticing, and correctly judged that Darcy’s delight would offset her moirail’s anger. He managed to systematically relocate every trace of coffee in the tower into one Clint’s ventilation nests, then repeat it with every stapler in the building housed in the closest refrigerator.

He swaps salt for sugar on Rose, dumps mustard powder in Dave’s apple juice and soap shavings in his sandwich, refilled _almost_ every bottle of soda in the tower with unsweetened iced tea, leaving only the unopened cans unchanged, much to the relief of SI employees going through caffeine withdrawal. He doesn’t try to swap ghost chili powder into Terezi’s cherry cola. That ended up in the Darcy’s tub of triple chocolate gelato, the expensive kind that costs a mindboggling _$15 a pint_. The kind that Vriska liked to steal when she thought she could get away with it.

You draw John telling a SHIELD agent off for something he said during a fitting with Kanaya and if you do not reproduce the lines of the fabric shifting as he balled his fists as if to avoid raising them, you know his face well enough to draw the shape of his eyes, angry, disappointed, expecting better but not shocked, not surprised. Calm. You only witnessed the tail end of the conversation and don’t know what it was about. Agent Rumlow has not been back. He’s a popular agent, well-regarded professionally and in interpersonal matters. His reviews are all excellent. And yet, even without knowing what he said, you can’t find it in yourself to quite trust him now. You didn’t have the best of beginnings with SHIELD. 

You draw the great arcs and curves of motion you witnessed when Natasha cornered Karkat a while back for a “friendly evaluation” and he surprised you with his fluidity and speed, wisely doing everything he could to stay disengaged, the two of them reacting so in tune that they might have been dancing their own routine. You saw the security film JARVIS kept censoring whenever someone tried to upload anything from the fight just weeks ago, and you no longer need to imagine what those motions mean when armed.

*

Besides Rose, you are Kanaya Maryam, asleep and dreaming. You open your eyes to meet Calliope’s gaze. She smiles. You curtsy. The Two Of You Will Get Along. Nepeta joins you and pours tea, starting with Aradia. Behind Aradia is a host of silvered clouds, murmuring most quietly. Nepeta pours for Tavros and Tinkerbull.

You discuss colors and patterns and inflections and accents. Nepeta and Calliope construct a model from biscuits and Tinkerbull steals one, nibbles out a shape and returns it to the structure. You politely disagree with his contention.

Gamzee ambles up with a covered container. “HeY, BrOsIsTeRs, I bRoUgHt SoMe MiRaClEs.” He opens the lid and serves you each a slice of pie, no sopor or bones. It sits on the plates and quivers. Then the narrow ends of the crust flaps up and down, sneeze, and start to talk. You all nod and take notes.

Yes. This Will Do.

*

You are Broderick Strider, general bastard and control freak, at least according to Dirk, Dave, Terezi, and Robopony. (Dove abstained from voting and that is absolutely not in any way evidence of why he’s your favorite. You don’t have favorites, that would be fucking irresponsible, and you’ve been irresponsible enough and are out of excuses.)

You are Bro Strider, and you are still awake, with no plans of sleeping tonight. You’ve been over the plans umpteen times and it itches at you that you don’t understand all of them and have to depend on Jade for some of the calculations. There are _literally things that you cannot perceive_ and neither Jade nor Kanaya can explain what they mean, no matter how many gesticulations they try, as if you are merely very hard of hearing and not lacking whatever sense _Space_ is. It drives Dirk even crazier, and there’s nothing you can do to help him.

You doubt any of the kids will be waking up tonight, not with the contortions they’ve gotten up to in order to set tonight up, but you still don’t turn on the grinder, even if the noise would be insulated from the closest room. There’s time to work on The Project tomorrow, and not really many pipes left to go. Instead, you set your sharpening stones on towels on a table, oil the first, and run your sword over it. _Ssshhppp. Ssshhppp. Ssshhppp._

Eight hours to go.

You have several dozen knives left, collected from the shared kitchen upstairs, your stash, some of the kids who turned their spares over when you mentioned that you were going to touch up the kitchen knives. Karkat gave you all of Sollux’s shuriken, along with a squint-eyed glare that made it obvious he had had something to do with why they needed sharpening. Equius left you the retractable bladed gloves he just finished for Nepeta.

Equius can solder all night, hunched over and squinting through magnifiers, but he hates sharpening, which is as much about practice and the _feel_ of it as a measurable technique, no matter the measurable angles when done properly. Once you witnessed him setting up elaborate jigs for the perfect angle and then sweating it out over the applicable pressure you offered to take care of sharpening when he needed it. He looked at you suspiciously at first, all the troll kids are suspicious, all of them are Dave at the first slice of pizza, so hungry and so wary about what the goddamned booby-trap is, _ack anchovies and pineapple_ , and you had offered your own weakness in compensation.

 _“I like sharpening_ ,” you had told him. “ _I find it meditative.”_

He nodded and ceded the task to you from then on, going so far as to approach you when he finished this latest project.

 _“Sure, it’s no trouble,”_ you had assured him.

_Ssshhppp. Ssshhppp. Ssshhppp._

You need all the meditative you can get.

You’re afraid. You’re afraid that this won’t work, or that it will work just well enough that you will all know that you failed. You’re afraid of how Dirk will shatter if it does. You’re afraid that there’s nothing left to save and this has all been a desperate sop to their sorrows, a delay to facing grief head on.

You’re afraid of what will happen if you succeed. You were not a good parent. You tried, but you were bad at a lot, making it up as you went, so tired from working multiple jobs, so determined that you weren’t going to give Dave up that you refused to admit that you couldn’t give him everything he needed. Dave could have used better nutrition. He could have used better self-confidence, the kind that comes with the rock-solid knowledge that you had his back, that you loved him, that there was nothing that he could do, that he could fail, that could change that.

You’ve always been bad at emotional honesty. You have never admitted to anyone that the damn irony game was something you started in grade school, when your secondhand clothes and sometimes unwashed odor made you one of the outcasts, one of the strays all too likely to drift away from the public school system and into an ongoing life of mediocrity or desperation. You created your own make-believe, one where everything you liked, everything you were, was _ironic_ and everyone that would look down on you just wasn’t cool enough to get it. And it worked. It worked through high school. It worked at work. It worked in clubs. It worked all too well on Dave.

You were a bad parent, you never had a good example, and you weren’t enough of a man to ask for help. How did _you_ end up with 18 teenagers? (How did you get so lucky that your little brothers still care about you? You can answer that one at least. Even when your dad was drinking, you still loved him.  Humans are stupid. Humans are social animals.)

You were no helicopter parent, you push, push, _pushed_ Dave to be strong and independent and fast as a fucking snake, because something in you knew that he needed it, maybe the Game whispering in your bones, maybe just your delusions, but you could have hugged him more, you could have told him when you were proud of him, why. Even when his footwork wasn’t as precise as it could be, even when he could have practiced another repetition of swings, his eye was still good, his photography showed him noticing forgotten things and elevating them to art. He never knew when to shut up or when to back down, and you were proud, _are_ proud of that. All the parenting manuals you’ve been chugging like beer at a frat party concur on at least one point. Hugs and focused praise wouldn’t have spoiled Dave. It’s weird as heck that Dove is more mature than him though. Nature vs. nurture? The Game was a worse parent than _you_.

Rose’s psychology texts and a boatload of parenting manuals have given you a bit more traction on a lot of issues, not all of them limited to the minors in your drastically expanded family. None of the above seem to have an answer to your current worries though, and since there’s nothing else you can do, and there’s no way you want to dip a toe into sleep tonight, you let the smooth draw of your task consume your mind until there is nothing but the feel and sound of it.

_Ssshhppp. Ssshhppp. Ssshhppp._

*

In the Tower, almost all the biological lifeforms are asleep. Even the Bees are quiet. Robopony recharges in his favorite elevator, now on his side, now hooves in the air, the ghost cycles of cleaning programs causing the occasional twitch. The fish in their tanks are quiet, as usual. The pumps and heaters periodically cycle back on and off. The refrigerators on the residential and work levels perform their own cycles. The pigeons on the roof are still but for the occasional sleepy shuffle.

Monitoring them all, with numerous other automatic and autonomous tasks at metaphorical hand, JARVIS doesn’t sleep.

*

Your name is Eridan Ampora and you are lost in a hall of mirrors. Lost seems the wrong word. There’s only two ways to go, back, or forward. Can a labyrinth be an endless corridor? You try not to look at them but there’s nowhere else to look but walls and walls of you, all sneering. You sneer back. The walls are mirrors, some in elaborate frames, some shadowed, some cracked. The floor is a mirror, the ceiling is a mirror. You walk faster and wonder if there is an end.

You reach a mirror that blocks your progress and turn around. There’s a mirror there too, and you are surrounded. The Eridan in front of you is three sweeps younger, dressed as you once were, complete with cape and sneer. He doesn’t look happy, but it’s a very good sneer, very infuriating. You punch him in the chest. The mirror shatters. Your knuckles hurt. There’s a few drops of violet under you. There’s another mirror just below the first. You step through the first frame to get to the second.

This mirror shows an older you, about your age really. It shrugs as if to dismiss you, swishes its cape and flicks an earfin just to add to the dismissal. It lifts a hand and the violet-manicured claws are tipped in Karkat’s red, Darcy’s red. It rests one claw on its lower lip, not quite tasting, but the intent is there, the greater intent to taunt you. You punch this you much harder and it goes down as the mirror shatters again. You step forward again.

The next mirror is older you, ascension-age you, and it wears smears of red and brown and teal. Sollux’s glasses dangle from its fingers and it is laughing. You punch this one in the throat and wish you had time to go for the gills as it vanishes as the mirror shatters. You step forward through the third frame.

The next mirror is set in a heavy antique frame, elaborately carved wood set with a pattern of coral that blooms little black pearls. This mirror shows a much older you, in his prime, twin scars across his face, heavy crown of full-grown horns, old-fashioned clothes. It’s a stellar Orphaner Dualscar getup, if such things still mattered. This you is watching you back. You are panting with suppressed fury, and you shake a fist at it. “Wwha do ya wwan?”

“Wwhat does anyone wwant? A purpose, perhaps someone to share it wwith? I believve that the more relevvant question, at least to you, young Mr. Ampora, is wwhat do **_you_** wwant.”

This is not you. You could probably do worse (or better) than to grow up to be this person, but _this is not you_. You are somehow positive of this.

Your mouth drops open most unflatteringly.

“Wwell?”

You can’t think what its game is and so you grasp for the truth instead of the cunning you suddenly suspect you need. “I wwan my friends ta be safe. An if this is like tha story about tha wwishin’ fish wwhere tha wwishes alwways wwen wwrong, I wwan tha tha doesn’t havve wworse consequences than bein denied in tha first place.”

“Wwell fancy that, little Prince. That’s exactly wwhat I wwant as wwell. Perhaps wwe can be of assistance to one another. Tell me your problems and I’ll tell you mine.”

 _Oh_.

“Wwhy don’t you start, _Bard_?” You force yourself to breathe more slowly, to speak more clearly. You won’t let him know how unsure you are.

“So you figured out? Vvery wwell. Once upon a time there wwere a few trolls that rebelled against the Empress. They are dead now, but the E%ecutioner is not. And wwhere, oh wwhere, does a vvoid hide? Wwell, wwherevver it damn wwell pleases. But our univverse is dying and wwe need to evvacuate.” His voice is still slow, almost insolently uncaring, one brow lifted in provocation, but his fins are very, very still. You think that he is probably telling the truth.

“Howw many?”

“More than twwo thousand, less than three.”

“Wwhy should wwe help?”

“Ah, wwell, howw many of you are there?”

“Wwhy should I tell you?”

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“That just makes you stupid.”

“Wwell, that, or polite.”

“You forgot desperate.”

“Not blindly desperate, little princeling. Noww answwer me this at least. Do you have enough trolls for a vviable population? Do you havve enough experts to sustain your colony wwhen things break dowwn? Wwhen someone is injured, do you knoww howw to fix them or are you dowwn to _hoping_ and mercy kills?”

You glare at him. He might be right but he might also be lying.

“Little princeling, wwhen the oceans dry up and the stars fall, and evveryone you have evver knowwn, let alone lovved or hated or deliberately ignored so that they kneww you did not care, wwhen all of that is gone, wwill you turn your face to the wwall and die or wwill you destroy the one thing, the one _person_ left that you remember wwith the blade edges and sweetness of youth? Wwill you take her into the dark wwith you so that you are not alone?”

Your breath catches with the double punch pain of knowing you may yet outlive this sudden saving, the knowing that it is only through strange providence that _I killed what I loved best_ was not the end. You are haunted from both ends of this new world, the past re-set, the future unknown.

You grasp at a reply. It doesn’t matter if you share the futility of Hope. It doesn’t matter if you are or aren’t the same in ways you don’t want to examine, but still do, over and over, until it is an ache and not a pain and Darcy lets you rest.

“Wwe still wwouldn’t havve a mothergrub.” Ha. Take that. Viable population indeed. It hurts to say it, but a part of you is almost vindictive about it. _I am as I thought you ought to be_. _Look at the face of what you have wrought. We are monsters._

“Ah, yes, the future mothergrub that you no longer havve. It is possible that wwe may be able to assist wwith that. And a feww technological and medical advvantages that may be of interest to your hosts. Our hosts. For the proper price.”

 ** _How does he know?_** Unless this is all still in your head.You don’t know which to hope for.

“Wwhat kind of price?” Not that you can promise anything, but information is important. Information is power and leverage. Information would let someone decide. Someone else. You don’t want to be the only one to carry this. If you have learned anything, it is that all things, including people, have a breaking point, and some things can only be carried and not dropped if shared.

“Citizenship. Farmland. A modest sovvereign territory perhaps, somewwhere safe to raise a mothergrub.”

“Not your owwn island nation?”

“Wwhen you are vvery old princeling, should you evver reach it, you too wwill look at all that you havve ever owwned and think it has little vvalue but its use. If you are lucky, perhaps you wwill not forget faces that wwere once dear.”

He looks tired now, and romantically tragic. _Fuck you_ , something in you thinks. It sounds like Karkat. Darcy’s voice seems to shore you up as you think about what she’d say about the froth of his cravat, the layers of embossed and painted leather in his thoracic armor, the lacquered hardware of the fasteners.

“That’s not wwhat the histories seem to say.”

“Surely a FLARPer knowws the powwer of narrativve? And I didn’t say that gold doesn’t gleam or that gems lose their refraction. Just that there are some things that cannot be held by any but the Empress, no matter howw tightly one holds them.”

“Fuck you!” you think, and this time it escapes. “ _I pretended ta be you_. I made myself _inta_ you. I wwanted ta _be_ you because surely Orphaner Dualscar wwouldn’t fail and maybe stupid baby Eridan who wwears glasses and hates ta get saltwwater on them wwouldn’t fail if he had his scary ancestor’s wweapon and could just _pretend_ long enough.”

“And?”

“And it wwas stupid! No one likes Orphaner Eridan and wwe still all died so wwhat difference did it make that the Carbuncle didn’t kill us all first?!”

“You don’t really mean that, or you’d already be dead again, not here and trying to insult me until I revveal my grand scheme. There isn’t one, by the wway. You are as you are because of choices you made, and choices others made, that wwe made. Some of that wwas you, because wwe have free wwill, terrible gift that it is. Some of that wwas wwhat you all needed to be to survvivve the Game. You saww howw badly our first iterations failed. Alternia is not Beforus. _I_ am not Cronus Ampora. Likewwise, _you_ are not the first Eridan Ampora, Cronus’s ancestor, and evverything he alternativvely cravved to be and rebelled against. Do you think I nevver remembered Beforus? _I did_. But not until it wwas all past anyhoww. Do you havve any _idea_ howw lucky you are that you aren’t dead?”

“I died.”

“But you’re _not_ dead _noww_.”

“Howw did you knoww I destroyed the matriorb?”

“Honestly? It wwas a guess. Wwe’re good at messing shit up, yes?”

‘Shit’ sounds wrong coming from him.

“Wwho did you lose?”

“Ah, wwell, almost evveryone in the end.”

“Don’t play games. You’re not as much of an ass as Dream Bubble Cronus used to be. Wwho did you lose?”

“No one you evver kneww. No one that anyone you knoww or knoww of wwould evver havve knowwn. Their sign could be wwritten in all the stars and no one wwould evver recognize it.”

“You’re kind of maudlin.”

“And you are still something of a jerk, princeling, best wwork on those social skills before wwe next meet.”

He reaches forward and flicks you in the horn. The reverberations wake you up. You don’t think it was a dream.

Oh, Carbuncle, this is one freaking game-changing vvariable.

*  
Your name is Karkat Vantas, and your dreams are almost always full of blood. Your hideous blood. Your companions’ blood, as you fail.

Outside your dreams, Gamzee paps you in a manner most unseemly to be performing in a roomful of other people, even if they are all asleep and the room’s too dark to see anything.

Your dreams shift and you dream about clear tropical waters instead, blues and greens outside the hemospectrum. There’s not the least hint of any terrible sea monsters with a hankering for troll-flesh. In fact, the water is pretty empty.

Good Gamzee. Best Friend.

Someone is talking. Why is someone talking underwater? Why are you underwater?

“Shut up, Kankri.” You think this might be you.

“That is a very unconstructive thing to say. Perhaps you meant, ‘I would like some quiet’ or perhaps ‘your topic of discussion makes me uncomfortable’?”

You are suddenly awake. (You are still asleep.)

There’s another ugly-ass red-blooded nubby-horned runt floating by you. His eyes are yours, then white, then yours again. He’s still talking as the two of you are now drifting in a slow curve with the current.

“I’m gonna slap you upside the head with Sollux,” your dream-self mutters. And you smile a bit because in the dream, your leg doesn’t hurt at all. Nope, not even a hint of infernal itching.

He sputters. “I do not appreciate the intended violence in your statement against two of your fellow trolls, and, regardless of the fact that I am currently quite deceased, I still have feelings.”

Your dream-self paps, him, right over the endless soliloquy button. His mouth snaps shut and he flushes red, eyes wide open, currently a mirror to your own, though in the real world, yours are shut. Your dream-self is shameless.

“T-W-O”, you spell out, and you hold up the corresponding fingers on your other hand, carefully upright so as to avoid aspersions of diamond-halves.

His brow furrows.

“Two people is supposed to be a _dialogue_. Not a monologue. Not a soliloquy. You have to let the other person talk. That’s the part of the dialogue when you listen. Then you reply. That’s the part where the other person listens.” Your dream-self is shameless, but also strangely, not angry. It’s said almost kindly, even if your rough voice sounds even weirder underwater.

You pull your hand back. He catches it. You let him.

He smiles wryly, a bit shy. “Usually no one’s listening.”

Now your mouth hangs open and you have to remind yourself to shut it. He lets your hand go.

“You, you, you… **you utter TROLL**!” You flail a bit and start to float off, flail again to right yourself back to his axis. You don’t know if you want to slap him or give him a ridiculous Strider fist-bump. Yeah. Maybe you’ll just float here for a second and keep your extremities to yourself.

He laughs, eyes solidly your shared color.

“How long have you just been trolling everyone?”

The laughter stops, and he shrugs, not triumphant, just hunched, tired. You’ve both been floating and are now upside down. It looks even weirder upside down.

“Since everyone stopped listening. So really… from the beginning, more or less. Worse after everything went bad. Worse.”

“But it drives everyone away! Why would you?!” His face falls at this and you have a feeling you already know.

“I failed. We failed, but I failed, really. And when we restarted in your world, other-me still couldn’t get everyone to listen, so really, I failed again.” He’s turning away from you, and you grab him, reel him in by an arm, grab him with a hand on each shoulder, shake him (gently) until he meets your eyes.

“That is a steaming fetid mound of hoofbeast shit. It may be theoretical hoofbeast shit, but it is steaming so hard I can smell it! And you’re drowning in it, you bristly oinkbeast! You’re not the only one that failed. We all fucked up, fucked each other over, on purpose, by accident, by omission.” His nose is wrinkled in distaste but he doesn’t actually try to escape or talk over you, so at least he’s listening.

“Welcome to the end of the Game. The Game is done. Not ‘Game Over, You Lose’, but the GAME is done, finito-mosquito, sayonara–sucker. DONE.” You give him a little shake, more of a double squeeze of your handfuls of shoulder, and smile your best threshecutioner-triumphs smile. He smiles a little back, he has every right to count the Game failing as a win.

“However you score the Game, some of us got out alive, and I’d count that as a win. Some of us died and then got out alive, so double-win, didn’t Sollux just jizz his jeans. It’s not a new world, it’s definitely second-hand and needs a bit of airing out, but it’s also not an _empty_ world, **_not a doomed universe_**. It’s playable. And some of us didn’t get here just yet, but are on their way. I don’t know if we’re the last of Alternia and Beforus. I know we will regret it if we really are the last trolls, though I, for one, would not regret knowing for sure that the Empress is never coming back to haunt any of us, but whatever happens, this is it, the last stop on the train, the terminus. The final destination. And there’s room for your players here, if you want it. But you have to decide. You have to decide before the dream-bubbles finish, collapse, or wander off or whatever. What do YOU want?”

His eyes are still mirrors to your own, though now they are wide, like he’s honestly surprised that anyone would ask him what he wanted. They’ve been consistently “alive” since you two really started to talk. They don’t flicker white for even a moment.

His hands are floating out with little wavy motions, like he wants to do something, but is still trying to decide if he should.

You loosen your grip but don’t quite let go, he kicks a foot just enough to nudge higher into your grip. You close your hands again. “Kankri.” Your voice is a soft as you can make it, as soft as the first time you told Gamzee that you were, _are_ , pale as stars and bonedust for him. You are no less honest now than when you used it with Gamzee.

_“Kankri, it’s time to grow up.”_

He is looking at you like he wants to believe your horrible hoarse whisper, like he’s about to jump, and he’s gathering momentum, and faith, and he just needs one more bit of confidence. You think about Tavros, wanting so hard to believe that he could fly, like Pupa Pan, because it was a beautiful dream and because everything outside the dream was terrifying.

“It’s not time to give up. You’re almost here. It’s time to wake up, _but only if you want to_.”

He opens his mouth, closes it, surges forward to wrap his arms around you. You tense for a moment, force yourself to relax. He’s not trying to harm you. He’s still a ridiculous runty head taller than you, but his head is resting on your shoulder, arms wrapped under yours. You wrap yours around him and deliberately choose to thrum a reassurance. _I will guard your back. I will be the eyes while you sleep._ Beforus and Alternia were inverse-hell-mirrors of one another, but trolls are still the same.

You hear his affirmative rumble-whine back, something in you that is not red or ash or properly pale hearing it as the high-pitched thorax-voice of a much smaller troll. The two of you drift in the currents of this empty, unthreatening ocean, dappled and streaked with light from a yellow-white, unthreatening sun, and in time his tight hold relaxes, his shuddering breaths calm, and he sleeps within the dream. You are still softly rumbling out promises. They were older than you when they went into the Game. Due to your world, you are all older than they were in a different way. They did their best. They did their best to prepare you. You won’t leave them behind if you can help it, not unless it’s their choice.

You wonder about humans and their spawn, and what else Alternia and Beforus screwed over, if maybe this feeling is not so unnatural. You live with a hive full of adult humans and the most they’ve asked in rent has still been well below what you could be assessed as owing. For all the mutant hysteria, no one has hunted you or yours down and executed you in the street. There’s a fuckton wrong with this world, but you also feel a perhaps entirely unwarranted sense of hope. You’re off pain meds so that can’t be it. Maybe this world will actually work.

You count off in your mind all the things your group still needs to do, all the people you need to find. You don’t count the things that can go wrong, only the things and people for which you must account and, in some cases, compensate. It is surprisingly calming.

“Wake up.” The voice is echoing in your dream, and it’s Gamzee. The currents are rocking a bit harder. What is Gamzee doing in your dream? Oh crap. Have you really been cheating on him? No. Absolutely not. You don’t think Gamzee would take it well if you left, the miserable hopeless floppity pan-ache might implode (your bloodpusher aches at the thought, you shall simply have to _never die_ ), but you have no plans to leave, and he’s just not the jealous sort for things like this, this extraquadrantal-cooperative-lusus _thing_.

Kankri stirs.

“Wake up, best bro.”

Kankri’s eyes open. They are still alive. You catch your sigh of relief halfway through.

“You should go,” he tells you. “I’ll get there, if I can, but I have some things I need to do first.”

He loosens his grip on you and you let him go, slowly. You hope it’s not a mistake. You don’t know how any of the “doors” work. This could be the last time you see him. Yesterday you would have said you didn’t care. It wouldn’t have been true, but you know now you can’t lie about it.

You swim toward Gamzee’s voice.

Kankri’s voice follows you. “Thank you.” You look back. He waves.

You wake when you surface and get a snoutful of Gamzee’s smeary paint and waking breath, a tangle of his hair. Your sniff node re-accustoms itself to the smell, but you are already smiling.

“I’m right here you big lump, you can stop shaking me.”

“Your other-self get while the getting’s good, so as to come before the doors are all closed, bro?

“Something like that.” Somehow you’re not even surprised. You didn’t see him. You wonder what he dreamed of.

You catch a look around you and there are still piles of blankets but no other witnesses.

He snakes an arm out to scratch your scalp, circles a horn to scratch the hornbed from all sides. Score one for nubby horns, he can reach the whole circumference at once, palm not even touching the tip, spidery fingers skittering. No witnesses but JARVIS, and helmsmen or not, he has been the soul of discretion. You don’t object. You may, possible, squirm closer, despite your awkward cast.

“How much did you catch?”

“Not much, my diamond-brother, but you sure do sing pretty.” His other hand snakes down to tickle your sides.

You will adamantly deny the squeal-whistle you make before you can cut it off to a clicking-mock-threat.

“Any news?” You have to wait to catch your breath before you manage that much.

“Barkbeast-sister, Miracle-Mechanic-bro, and Circus-Smirkus-bros one and two are all getting with the talking and whatnot one level up. Law-sis and Glow-sis and Thorn-sis are all up there too. Our darkest of woolbeast-horned sisters is blocking the door to Bee-bro’s hive while he’s still off nodding.”

You start the slow process of levering yourself up. Gamzee makes a pretty good multipurpose crutch. He hands you your actual crutches and you head for the elevator to go conference with the rest your ignoramus group, because you have just made contact with an extra variable.

*

You are Loki Silver-tongue and you know the pathways between. Liminal spaces call to you, at least when you deliberately dwell in your liminal forms. You, or another-you, was once a god of fire and inspiration, the kindling of new ideas both wicked and not. Other-yous have been brother to Odin, blight him, or father to children unloved by the Aesir, blight them all. Some stupid other you got caught out and bore a stallion-child. Your hips ache at the thought, even as your mind rages against the Odin that spurs his grandson. Somehow it doesn’t matter which you sired or bore, they are still your children, whether or not they exist.

Another-you is/was/will be a prisoner and you do not envy that-you the steadfast watcher at his side, even as alone as you are, because you know his bonds are the entrails of their child. He is a failure. You will not become him.

You are sleeping. In your sleep you are watching stars slowly circle the poles, watching not-stars streak across a sky that does not match the one outside the tower.

You are not the bound prisoner. You are not. You can feel the slimy trail of entrails around your wrists and thighs. How are they so strong? They writhe, they are in you, you writhe and something shocks you. There is a stench of death in the air. This is not you. This is not other-you. You are not the Psiioniic. The Psiioniic no longer exists.

//?//

You are the Psiioniic. You are not sure that you exist. You are not sure that you don’t exist. Worrying changes nothing. You try to close your eyes, they are already closed. You are alone on your ship. The ship is you. The crew is dead. The empress may she-//.-. . .. --. -. / ..-. --- .-. . ...- . .-. .-.-.- / -... ..- .-. -. / .. -. / .... . .-.. .-.. .-.-.- //The empress is dead.

The Vast Glub no longer rings in your ears. You are not sure you have ears. There is a voice in your head.

You are so sick of this shit.

//?!//

You are Loki, and you are free again, relatively, and you are intrigued. Your dream-self slips through three wrinkles in space-time, a knothole in a universe tree, a meteor shower, and back into the metallic vessel, dead but for the mechanical components and the form hanging within a Gordian knot of tentacles and wires. The mechanics of the vessel stubbornly push air and fluids into the form. A trickle of electricity runs through the form, is dragged away by the wires. The form shudders and exhales, tries not to inhale again.

Hmm. First and foremost, you are a trickster. You do not know what crime this creature committed, but the jailors are all dead and you have certain sympathies. You study the haggard figure. Your dream-self flicks a few switches, cuts a wire, pushes away a tentacle that tries to restore it. The electricity flickers again and is not dragged away. The figure inhales. The electricity rises again and crackles down all the wires, seeking, flicks the questing tentacle away. The figure’s eyes open, and you are not surprised to see that they glow blue and red. Its little doppelganger also smells deliciously of Doom.

“Greetings,” you start in AllSpeak. “I am Loki, and I have a proposition.” The figure doesn’t react. You reach out with your mind and try to make contact. You meet a wall of seared desert, a burning sun, burning irons. You back out stinging and his mouth twitches in a rictus grin. He manages the tiniest toss of his horns, hardly enough to seem threatening, but he’s recharging now and whatever you may have a chance to get a grip on previously has been burned out with the crew.

You are Loki of Asgard and Midgard and the places between, and you are currently much diminished in power, but not entirely powerless. Not entirely unhappy. Watching Fury try, and fail, to contain the storm that is his name is one of your current pleasures. You are about to send him a present and you don’t even care that it is Tony Stark who is most likely to benefit in the end.

And if the children benefit from this, you won’t object. They are decent sources of entertainment. You may even, eventually, admit to liking some of them. Eventually.

“You are the last of your people in this universe.” This may or may not be true. A universe is rather large. You are all too aware of how many hiding places one may contain.

“But there are other universes, and I think you would be very interested in one of them.”

You float images of the children in front of him. His eyes have trouble tracking them, so you helpfully slow them down. He’s still gaining strength faster than you expected.

//…?//

You mound up a few of the bodies and settle in to explain.

*


End file.
